Milt Reeves oral history transcript

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Milt Reeves
I'm Milt Reeves. Most people know me by that but Milt happens to be my middle
name. My name is really Henry M. but I prefer Milt and it's a pleasure here to be
here this morning and talk about, hopefully a little bit about the old days of the
waterfowl surveys and other waterfowl matters but I've been retired since 1983
from the Fish and Wildlife Service and I suppose that makes me an old timer but
I really don't think of myself in that respect nor as a pioneer in, in the north
American waterfowl program because so many other people did so much way,
way ahead of anything I may have done but I, I guess I should start something
about my resume. I was raised in New Jersey and I don't tell many people that
but now all of you folks know that and after World War II serving a little time in
the Navy and with the advent of the GI bill I decided to go to school as a forester.
I was always very much interested in hunting and particularly waterfowl hunting
but I had no idea that there's such a thing as a collage degree in wildlife. So, I
thought well, the next best thing probably is to become a forest ranger of some
sort and schools are extremely difficult to get into in those days after World War II
because everyone had the same objective I did, to get a college degree and
hopefully find some experience after that, that would be worthwhile. So, I applied
for a number of schools and I ended up being accepted first at Utah State
University at that time it was Utah State agricultural college and while I was in the
Navy I had a good friend from Utah and he talked about the beauty of Utah
many, many times and I'd never been there but what I had the choice of choosing
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between the schools I thought gee, why not give Utah state a try and so I did and
I had an old 1935 Chevy that I just overhauled the engine on and took off with a
few possessions to Logan, Utah and I'll never forget coming up over the summit
there between Brigham City and Logan and looking out over cash valley, I
thought what a beautiful, beautiful place this is and it's always been one of my
very favorite places, the setting of Logan in the Cash valley and the school
campus, absolutely beautiful but anyway after entering school there I soon found
that, well, my gosh you know, you don't have to be a forest ranger because we
offer wildlife management degrees and I was just absolutely elated and so I
switched my major from, from forestry into school of or department of wildlife and
at that time Jeff Slow, Dr. Jeff Slow is the leader of the Utah cooperative wildlife
research unit and I always tried to spend as much time as I could with Jeff, he
was an absolute fountainhead of knowledge about waterfowl because he'd done
his PHD degree at, at Iowa state on the Red Head Duck and I just by
happenstance, I couldn't have ended up I don't think at a better school as far as
my personal interests were concerned and then on top of that were the Great
Bear River marshes and the other fine marshes there in northern Utah so I think I
had just a splendid time there, under graduate work at the Utah agricultural
college and I graduated there in 1950. Well, upon finishing a degree I guess
somebody feels that you aught to get out and do something worthwhile and find a
job. Well, all of my friends in wildlife were going to become researchers and
although I was interested in research I thought it seemed to be a sort of a narrow
type of position to take upon just beginning in wildlife so I kept an open mind and
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finally ended up accepting a job at the, for the Idaho department of fish and game
in American Falls, Idaho in southeastern part of the state as a conservation
officer. Well, the duties of a conservation officer are largely law enforcement
oriented but in Idaho as did in many other states they capitalize upon their
conservation officers or whatever they maybe called, these are the work people,
this is the man power that's draw upon when big jobs have to be done and
they're located throughout the state, they're readily available and I think most of
the conservation officers even though they may be a bit law enforcement
oriented primarily they enjoyed these other jobs too and so at American Falls I
was able to participate in dove call count surveys and the pheasant surveys,
winter deer counts, waterfowl surveys, banding waterfowl, many, many things
and I've always looked back upon those days in American Falls as just a
splendid, splendid background to learn what wildlife management was all about.
So, I spent two years in American Falls as a conservation officer and then Bob
Saughter who was the state waterfowl biologist out of Boise took me aside one
day and he said you know, have you ever thought about going back and doing
some graduate work and I said well, yeah it's been at the back of my mind to do
that and he says you have an interest in, in waterfowl, correct? I said, absolutely,
I said that's what my life revolves around the most waterfowl and wetlands. Well,
he says we have, we're beginning a Pitman Roberson project in the southeastern
part of the state on an area called Digham marsh. It's a sixteen thousand acre
marsh at the upper end of Bear lake which straddles the border between Idaho
and Utah and he said, would you consider, would you be interested in doing the
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field work that we'd like to have done over there and he says perhaps you know,
he said you could use that for your graduate work too and immediately I was
interested in that and at first I thought about going to the University of Idaho, in
fact I'd already been accepted there for graduate work but I thought gee, that's in
another part, that's practically in another state and people in Idaho tell you that
we have two states, one is the southern part and then there's the totally detached
part up there at the north, up in the pan handle and at that time you couldn't drive
through the state of Idaho to get to the north part of the state, you had to detour
off on a road into Washington State and I think that probably has been corrected
since but anyway on second thought I thought perhaps Logan would be the best
place to go back to. I, I know the folks back there, down there, they know me, it's
handy, it's close by. These instructors and Jeff Slow are more oriented in the
waterfowl and wetlands then are the people in the faculty up the, up at Boscow,
Idaho. So, I made plans then to, to go back down to Logan. Well, my graduate
program was sort of screwy because I did my fieldwork before I did my academic
work. Gee, I could, I could, I could do the field work and get down there and
fuck, fuck my graduate, my course work, that thought did occur to me. But
anyway the graduate school down there with a bit of reluctance said yeah, okay
go ahead, do your field work and we'll take a chance with you and you're taking a
chance with us and we hope you have a good academic year when you come
down here to do your graduate work and finish up your dissertation, not
dissertation but thesis and so I did that for two years. Marilyn and I were married
them and we lived in Mount Puluer and that's in the Bear lake valley, a high
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altitude, 6000 foot western valley. The winters are long, long, long and the
summers are short and bitter cold and deep snows and we lived in a 20 foot
trailer, 20 foot long trailer, no indoor plumbing if you understand what I mean. It
was a very cold walk on a bitter cold winter day to the toilet which was about 20
yards away and we had a single kerosene stove in the trailer and we lived two
years that way, two winters. Well, the marsh itself is called Digham marsh and it
adjoins the Bear river which originates in Wyoming flows into, I'm sorry it
originates in Utah, flows into Wyoming into Idaho and back into Utah, empties
into the Great Salt Lake and in the process providing water to the Great Bear
river marshes. The state wanted a overall ecological study done of the marsh,
no one had worked on it much. There were a number of problems associated
with it. The main one probably being that President Garfield back in the, back in
the mid 1850's had granted to the Utah power and light company storage rights
to use Digham marsh and also joining Bear Lake, Bear lake itself as storage for
spring run off coming down the Bear river. The water was diverted through a
canal into Digham marsh and of course the current flow of the water slowed
there, so it deposited a great amount of silt in the marsh and then when the water
was still high it was funneled off into Bear lake. Well, later in the summer the
water, water problem reversed, the lake was still high, the marsh had dried up
pretty much, the Bear river was way down and so the waters returned from, was
thought Bear lake during exceptional years but usually the water is pumped
through a pumping station there on the edge of the lake into the marsh and then
flowed by gravity down the rainbow canal back into the, into the Bear river and so
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as an exchange of water into the marsh, into the lake, out of the lake and into the
marsh and on down the river, depending on whether it was spring or fall. Well, of
course this went through great fluctuations in the water level in the marsh itself
so there was a lot of concern about what this meant to waterfowl and there were
a fair number of geese nesting in the marsh. Bob Saughter told me when I
moved down there, if you find 100 goose nests he says, he says I just think that'd
be wonderful we don't, we hope there is that many geese there. Well, I think we
found, I found 125, the first year and as people suspected the geese that are
nesting on elevated area, when the water comes up and it was coming up during
the incubation period. These nests could very easily be flooded out and I did find
a few nests flooded out that first year but by in large most of the geese got off
successfully. There are a number of waterfowl, ducks that nested on the marsh
also and so I did a great deal of studies, nesting studies of the waterfowl and --
Well, to make a long story short after the field work was finished and I
concentrated chiefly on waterfowl production and harvest and also muskrat
production and harvest and a degree was accepted and I obtained the Master's
of Science degree there at Logan. I, I again had an important choice to make, go
back to the state of Idaho where I had a job up at the Alfred and Cort Awayne
way up in the north part of the state or maybe try something different. When in
the process I met a fellow by the name of Floyd Thompson who is a game
management agent and working for the Fish and Wildlife Service and he was in
charge of the state of Utah and I remember he came up one day and he said, he
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came over to visit our trailer and he, he said you know, what are you planning to
do? And I said well, I'm not absolutely certain. Well, he said, I'd like to interest
you in a job, an opportunity, he said I can't offer you the job but I could tell you of
some opportunities that exist. And I said well, I'm, I'm ears what are they? Well,
he said you know, because you've had law enforcement experience and with the
state of Idaho two years, you qualify for a position at US game and management
agent, you have to have two years of law enforcement experience and he said
we have two vacancies open in the Albuquerque region which is the
southwestern region of the Fish and Wildlife Service that he worked out of and he
said one job is in Tulsa, Oklahoma and he said the other job is in a new station
that we intend to open up in the lower route, Rio Grande valley in a place called
Harlington and I said well, tell me about both areas I've been in neither. Well, he
said let me tell you about Harlens in Texas and he says you may not what to
hear about the, about Tulsa, Oklahoma if I understand correctly, you are
interested in waterfowl. But he said Harlington is near Brownsville and he said of
near there is the Great Laguna Madre, this wonderful, wonderful water, waterfowl
wintering area that extents for 125 miles up the lower coast of Texas and he said
this is where mostly Red head ducks in North America winter. He said we don't
know how many are there but we think probably, probably three quarters of all
the wintering Red heads (inaudible) in one point in the Laguna Madre of Texas.
And he said, what people don't realize of course, of course are the enormous
numbers of Pintails that also winter there and now, he said, in addition to the
waterfowl he said, the White winged dove nests in enormous colonies in the
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lower Rio Grande valley in the native brush. He said those populations have
been declining because the ranchers have been cornering off the brush and we
still have a lot of white wings down there, we don't know an awful lot about them.
The state of Texas has a White wing biologist down there by the name of Bill
Keel and we'd like you to work on white wing doves when possible and of course,
he said the variety of all sorts of other migratory game birds down there but, he
said, also you'd have the opportunity to go to Canada on assignments every
summer and boy, if I ever had any question as to what to do which job and what
my future would be or at least beginning of it, it would certainly be to take that job
in Texas. So, I took the job of US Game Management Agent. The pay, the pay
as I recall was $4250.00 a year and that compared with as best as I can
remember $2450 or 60 dollars a year for the state of Idaho but I only got paid
once a month in Idaho, got paid twice when you go to work for the Feds. So, I
just bring that out at a matter of interest because money is not what drives
people who work in the field of wildlife management, they work in it because they
have other interests, things that are real dear to their heart. But, that may be of
interest. So, we said yes, we'll take that job, after consultation with, with the
better half here and so we still had the little 20 foot trailer and we had to report to
work ourself, there's no, no moving expenses or anything like I understand is
given routinely now for people entering on work and we hauled the 20 foot trailer
down to, down to Texas and in a day or, we found a place to put it in a trailer
court and in a day or two later Ed Elmore, who is the game management agent in
Corpus Christi who I worked under came down to welcome us to Texas and I'd
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also received a note from Larry Marafcu who was the, the chief of law
enforcement out of the regional office and Larry told me that the first week of the
job down there would be spent with him on orientation. So, Larry showed up
shortly and he was staying in Brownsville and so I'd drive down to Brownsville to
their, to Larry's hotel room and listen to Larry eight hours a day for five days.
Now, if you ever met Larry Marafcu, you know what I'm talking about. But,
anyway Larry is an extremely interesting fellow, very, very capable and
knowledgeable and boy did he like to talk. So, he said, he opened the meeting
and he says, he says this week he says, I hope to tell you everything that you
need to know as a game management agent. Now, he said I want you to take,
take a pad of paper and he said I want you to record this, everything I say of
consequence and there were no air conditioning in those days and this was in
July and extremely high humidity and it was a real ordeal. That week was one of
the worst weeks I ever spent in my life and occasionally Larry would look at me
and he says, he said you didn't take a note on that. He said, let me repeat what I
just said. Well, we finally got through the week all right and he went back to
Albuquerque and so I was left to drift there as a game management agent all on
my own. Well, fortunately my office was in the San Manteo Post Office. They
had arranged for that, it was in the basement again, not air conditioned of course,
extremely humid but the great advantage here was that I'd be sharing the office,
office space with a fellow by the name of Luther C. Goldman who was refuge
manager of the Laguna Atascosa and San Ada National Wildlife refuges. Now,
Luther was the son of Major E.A. Goldman who was one of the pioneer biologists
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of the old Bureau of biological survey and also he was a nephew of Luther
Goldman, L.J. Goldman as he's called who is the first pacific flyway biologist so
here is this triumvirate of three Goldman's and I had the benefit you know, of
hearing Luther tell of the experiences of his father and his uncle in the very early
days of Bureau of biological survey and I'll never forget all of that and of course
Luther had a, had a history of his own. Wonderful fellow, one of the, one that
services the very best ornithologist and birds and Luther is right at his home town
there because of all the exotic species across the border and almost all winter
long he was just besieged with birders that wanted, wanted to come and visit his
refuges and where might they find different scarce birds, rare birds. Well, so for
summer assignments the first two years were spent in, in Western Saskatchewan
north of Swift Current. In those days the survey crews always got together in
Regina, we had a big kickoff meeting. Everyone reported there, they received
their instructions, they received their bird bands if they were on a banding
assignment, if they're on surveys they received their survey forms and
instructions and everything and the great thing was, it was just not US Fish and
Wildlife Service people, the bulk of those folks were Game management agents,
this was the workforce at the time, a few refuge people and but also the
Canadians, the wonderful group of Canadians. The Canadian wildlife service
people and a lot of provincial people and people from Ducks Unlimited.
Everyone who was doing work in Canada in spring would meet at Regina and it's
just a wonderful opportunity for a new kid on the block like me to, to learn the
people I've heard, heard so much about but it was there that I had a chance to
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meet many people which later became good friends, folks like Walt Crissy and
Johnny Lynch and Jerry Stout, Al Smith, among the Canadians Guser
Grahamkooch, Al Exuban, Bernie Gallop and among the DU people, Bill, Bill
Leach and Bob Caldwell and a number of the provincial people too. It was truly a
cooperative program.
Q What year was this?
Good point. The first year up there was 1955, on assignment. I was assigned to
a brand new study area in north of Swift current and this was an area that had
just been set up by, a brand new area that had been set up by Walt Crissy. He'd
formed the area and thought it would make a wonderful study area for two
purposes. One purpose was to use it for air to ground comparison counts. In the
air ground comparison count survey a, a designated area could be a lineal block
of habitat or whatever would be, would be flown by the air with the, with the
operational survey crew to see how many breeding ducks they would come up
with, at the same time the area would be checked on the ground by a ground
crew who would be ground truthing the area and between comparing the two of
them there would be an air to ground visibility ratio and there could be applied to
the aerial survey data in order to correct the, the aerial data because obviously a
plane zipping across the county side at a hundred and some feet above the
ground and at the speed of 70 or 80 miles an hour or whatever it might be, simply
not time to see, opportunity to see every duck and you're hoping that do see a
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representative sample of them. So, we always see far more birds on the ground
doing the ground truthing then with the aerial crews and this of course still occurs
today and ground surveys are still used today for that purpose so this is an idea
that dates back prior to my first study up there dated back certainly into the early,
early 50's for developing the air to ground comparison corrections. But the area
we worked on was called the success area and people used to joke about that,
you know success stud area, that's a little bit pompous isn't it calling it the
success study area. Well, that was easy to explain because the only town along
the transect was named success. Well, in the southeast southwestern corner,
well success was a two elevator town and that needs a little explanation I think
but in Canada at least in those days it used to be customary to, to identify the
size of the town by their number of grain elevators it had, it be two elevator towns
which really weren't much and there'd be three elevator towns which gee, now
we're beginning to talk about a you know, a, a occupied part of the country where
a four, four elevator town would have most of the things you would need on a
daily basis and, and but we went to Swift Current and Swift Current we, we
rented a house there. I was working at the time with, it doesn't come to me--
Doesn't come to me--
But, Swift Current was also a railroad center for the transcontinental railroad and
also that, that year the transcontinental highway was being built across, across
continent. Also, oil, oil fields had been found north west of town and so there
was considerable oil drilling going on too, so Swift Current was a pretty, pretty
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active town and housing was hard to find but we did, Maury Lundy and I did find
a place to stay and so we worked out north of town. We worked everyday if the
weather was good. Our purpose was to inventory breeding pairs of ducks on the
natural wetlands, the pothole country. We were in the type of pothole country
that Johnny Lynch would have called the BOP, BOP means bald open prairie.
Johnny Lynch had a great language for descriptive language for things. If I might
deviate a minute but anyway he called the prairie pothole region of the southern
three Canadian provinces and the Dakotas, he called that area the BDF, BDF
being big duck factory. North of the BDF was the BFF, that was the big fish
factory and Johnny would simplify things for convenience but what, what he is
telling us here was that the, the BDF, the big duck factory, this is where the, is
really the heart of the waterfowl production in North America. This is where the
glaciers left the potholes and marshes. It's so productive for waterfowl and
although waterfowl of course breed farther north through the forested country
and clear, clear to the artic and through Alaska and some of our birds even get
into Siberia, the Pintails breed there but winter in, in North America. But, what
Johnny was telling us here was that the, the big fish factory yes, it produces a fair
number of ducks because of it's great, great extent but gee, it was really known
for it's fish you know, so this is the big fish factory but anyway we were working in
the bald open prairie, it's total treeless except for farm shelter builts, that the
farmers put in and it was great pothole country. We had about 90 potholes per
square mile and we had about that number of breeding ducks as I remember, the
most common species was the Blue winged teal followed by the Mallard and
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Pintail were pretty close, Gadwall and the Shoveler, those were the big birds that
we worked with then. So, our purpose was to go out and inventory the ducks
along this 40 mile long route which was a quarter mile wide, the same as the
area flown by the aerial crews, inventory the number of ducks by species and
whether they're paired or single birds or whatever and do this as often as we
could and it'd take easy about three to four days to do the 42 miles and as soon
as we'd finish we'd start over again and we did this about four times during the
peak of the breeding season and during this time the aerial survey crews Walt
Crissy usually and his observer would come in and fly the area and sometimes
we'd see them and some times not but I, I mentioned that we, we did this
everyday, no Saturdays off, no Sundays off, there's no overtime, there's no comp
time, in fact that was generally true of the Fish and Wildlife Service in those days.
We worked as long as it took to get the job done. The only reprieve would be a
rainy day and it doesn't take much to put you out of commission on the prairies
when it rains, a quarter of an inch can do it because those roads get greasy slick
and most of them are gravel and un-paved, a paved route, road up there in those
days is quite unusual. So, on a rainy day that was a day that we'd stay in town
and do our laundry, we'd update our reports, correspondence, buy groceries,
things to the sort.
Q Did the air crews fly these comparison areas more then once or did they
just fly them once on an operational basis?
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That's a good question. There were a number, a number of these air ground
comparison units. There must of have been six or seven of them I guess but
they flew ours more then once. They flew it several times. I, I did see the
figures, I never saw what the, I never saw what the visibility ratios were --
(tape change)
A question had been raised here about overtime and everything I mentioned that
we never drew it or anything so let me go back if I can to the days back in the Rio
Grande Valley when I was working under Ed Elmore, US Game Management
Agent, my supervisor in Corpus Christi and of course I got instructions from Ed
and also during that week with Larry Marafca you know, to record everything I'd
done in some detail and so I did that and well, I put down the days and the times
I'd leave home to go to work, if I was leaving from home or the office or whatever
and when I'd return and it was very seldom that any of these were 8 to 5 you
know and this seemed to cause a problem and so I got Ed Elmore came down
one time soon after that and he said you know, you know, he says the hours that
you work and you report on your weekly activity reports, those are the actual
hours that you work, and I said that's right. Well, he says, you work a lot more
then 8 hours. And I said, well, it takes a lot more then 8 hours to get the job done
you know. Well, he said, he said I want you to continue to do that. He says you
are under my instructions to do that. Now, he says I've got a problem with the
regional office because the regional office would like us to show only eight hours
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of work per day. It needant be 8 to 5 but he says, the total hours should not be
more then 8 hours and Ed says I've always disregarded that myself and he says
and I, I always show actual hours working and he says, I'm your supervisor and
he says, those are the instructions I have for you and so I continued to do that
and finally Ed took me aside one time, and he said you know why, why I'm doing
what I'm doing with, regarding my hours of work each day and I said I have no
idea. Well, he says first off, he says you're automatically violating a, a Federal
law by, by changing reporting hours that you are not working. He says, he says,
you, you're required to show the hours, the actual hours that you do and he says
that's what I do and he says what you're doing. He says no problem. But he
says for some reason he thinks that the, the regional office seems to think that in
time this might build a record for somebody to come back in and ask for
additional pay and he, Ed said that's exactly what I intend to do after I retire. He
says, I'm going to put a claim in for all the additional hours I worked and he says,
it will be the test case and he said it will be very, very important and to make a
long story short, Ed eventually did retire, he did file claim against the government
for reimbursement of the additional hours that he worked. Well, the statute of
limitations entered into the thing of course that it was only the last two or years or
whatever it was that he was working that, that was subject to claim and that got
to be a huge controversy and to make a long story short, Ed got a court decision
in his favor for reimbursement of the hours he worked. I had no idea you know, if
it's full compensation, what the rate was or anything at all like that and at his
instructions I had been accumulating the same hours and everything and I, I
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decided never to file. I never filed for mine but that did set in motion then some
recognition that the people that were working additional hours and to if they were
to perform the jobs that they were being asked to do needed, it should be justly
compensated and that, I believe is how overtime first began in the Fish and
Wildlife Service and haven't followed it since, I have no idea what the situation is
now.
Q Continue now, you're on the breeding grounds there in Saskatchewan and
running those --
Okay, yeah back to, back to the Success study area and after we'd finish up the,
finish up the breeding pair surveys in May, May to about mid June, I was
returned to Texas, drive back down to Texas for about a week at home, turn
around and come back north to begin the work on the production surveys on the
Success study area and so I said gee, I, I really don't have an awful lot I can get
accomplished in Texas, there's an enormous amount of, of travel time and
expense and gasoline and so forth involved and I said would there be any
problem if I stayed up here? And they said well, if you do you gotta stay, you
gotta take annual leave you know, we can't give you any other dispensation to do
that so, anyway, I took annual leave up, stayed up there and my wife Marilyn
came up and oh, we took off to Prince Albert National Park I think, and we had a
wonderful camping and fishing trip up there so, back to the production survey.
Well, we surveyed exactly the same wetlands following the same procedures and
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everything except this time the purpose was to monitor what happened as a
result of the, of the breeding of the pairs that we'd inventoried in May and June.
We were counting broods and also broody like hens because lots of times you
may not see the brood but you can tell by the behavior of then hen as to whether
she has a brood in the nearby vegetation and this is a case where we were not
really ground truthing because there is no way that we could find every single
brood produced on that study area so almost all breeding ground surveys that
relate to waterfowl production had that same problem. It's enormous obstacles
that I'm not sure anybody's overcome yet. So, then usually about, after or during,
following these surveys we'd stay in Canada and band ducks and then return
back to our stations so this is just one perspective of what some of the summer
work was but other people were totally engaged at waterfowl surveys, other
people were full time banding, doing other things.
Q And what was happening with that information at that time? As far as the
process, of setting the regulations and what was the procedure back then?
All the information went back to Patuxant into a, most of the field people I think
will send it into some big black box back there because they were really not
involved in the, in the processing of the data and there is a great deal of work
that had to be done with, with the survey information that came in from the field
and this rested chiefly in the hands of Walt Crissy. Walt at that time was the
Chief Waterfowl Population person I'd guess you'd call him. He was in the
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division wildlife research at that time. And it was his job to put together all the
information, the breeding ground survey information, the production information,
adjusting the breeding survey information for visibility factors, things like that,
bringing information together in a comprehensive manner and then extrapolating
or projecting it to what we knew of the area that the surveys represented, the
universe represented by the survey and all that work was done back in Patuxent
with, with the staff and eventually the end product would be a waterfowl status
report. It'd be an evaluation of the number, of the breeding pairs of waterfowl
and, and an index as to what the population was at the, at the conclusion of the
production season. I, I hate to use the numbers of waterfowl because everything
almost we do is really based on indices, which fall short of what the actually
numbers of birds are. Then Walt was involved in carrying, carrying that
information from the surveys and everything and reporting this to the Federal
folks who are involved in establishing waterfowl frameworks and by frameworks I
mean the out of seasons, the number of hunting days allowed, the number of
ducks permitted per day, things of that sort and Walt did a fantastic job I think in
pulling that information together, not that everybody agreed with him. In fact,
there was a great deal of dissention and disagreement every year because
people were seeing parts of the waterfowl breeding grounds that were in superb
shape, they looked wonderful other parts were probably just as bad the other
way and the same with the public, the public would see bits and fragments of, of
wetlands habitat and wintering populations and what they don't appreciate is that
what they are looking at is not representive of typical of, of the whole universe
20
and when we're dealing with the continental population like waterfowl that has to
be our basis as to what the total population is doing. We're of course, interested
in what segments of it are doing to because they have their own flyways and
wintering areas.
Q What amazes me is that this is the time before computers. I mean you are
having all this data that you are have to in effect write down by hand and adding
machines and how long a process was that. I mean were they doing it in good
time?
Well, they were doing it with the, with the old Monroe calculators, I'm answer the
question about how the data was processed and in the days I've speaking of now
we didn't, the Patuxent Wildlife Research center where Walt was located after he
moved from the Washington office out there. There were no computers out there
and, and the place was jammed full of the old Monroe calculators. I don’t know if
you know what I'm talking about but you'd punch this data in by hand and they
were electrical and you'd crank them and they'd go (cranking noises) and they'd,
it goes to a, goes to a single calculation it might take half a minute I guess, or
something like that but very, very crude. Of course, no hand held calculators
either. Well, I, I talked about Crissy but I should say, Walt wasn't the first one to
put together information of that sort because surveys have been carried on for a
long time up in the Canadian Prairies back in the '30's. biologists went up there
for the bureau biological survey and did roadside surveys but nobody really knew
21
what they meant in terms of reflecting what was really going on up there and
Fred Lincoln was probably the key individual back in those days but it was his
responsibility to pull together all that information for setting regulations and so
Fred Lincoln in my view, I think it did a great deal with the research he had
available but he lacked the, a lot of the tools and, and manpower and everything
that we had later on.
Q What drove people like that? Like Fred Lincoln and these other guys, I
mean was it I mean, just scientific curiosity or was it concern that wrong
information would over harvest the species? Was it the threat of lawsuits? Was
it just that it has always been done? I mean I'm curious to how that leap was
made to start looking at the continental waterfowl resource as, in a
comprehensive year to year way?
I think there's probably two answers to that. One, is that every single one of
these people that I'm talking about have an innate interest and concern about
whatever resource they're working with whether it's waterfowl or morning does or
whatever. They just have this driven, drive interest in a, in a species and
secondly, secondly everyone of them as a character of curiosity or innovation.
They want to learn about the unknown and so I say, it's dedication first and it's
this deep curiosity second that drove most of these early pioneers of waterfowl
management and research in North America.
22
Q It wasn't like a Bureaucratic mandate to come up with these numbers, I
mean it sort of, they started coming up and people began I guess to see the
advantages to knowing this in terms of better managing the resource.
Yeah, I think I can answer that best but George B. Saunders was one of these
early people and he was the first Pacific, first flyway biologist in the central flyway
and was sent into Canada in the early '30's during '34 and 5 during the dust bowl
days and his instructions and they're instructions that other people like him
receive read something like this that there is a problem with ducks, we have duck
populations seem to be going down. We know ducks come out of the Dakotas
and Canada, go up there and find out what the problem is. It's that simple and
they were on their own at that point and they did the best they could with the
resources they had to try to best answer that question.
Q Art Hawkins talks about when he was setting up the you know, the system
of transects in Manitoba and how muddy the roads were and it must have been
you know, really, I mean just the dedication of those people is what really
amazes me because you're doing something that nobody can really check on
you, you know and you can come back with any kind of a report, nobody's going
to, going to doubt but there was a vision back then that, that really has been --
(Side B)
23
But they did have few advantages for example we didn't have safety meetings in
those days, safety reports, well, I guess we had to fill out a safety report maybe
once in a while but by in large we were pretty much free of bureaucratic
paperwork which I think there's a great deal of nowadays from what I can
determine. We run a different way in a given period of time we spent, able to
spend a much, much higher portion of our time in, in what we thought were the
important things to do.
Q Talk more about some of those early people like Lincoln and Saunders
and the Goldman's and those people that, that really made a difference. Explain
a little bit what the atmosphere was that nurtured those people.
Well, of course I didn't know a lot of these people and, and the few of them I did
know is some cases I knew them for a year or perhaps a day. Let me, let me go
back to George Saunders if I might but I was a game management in south
Texas and, and I was in the office one day and this gentleman walked in and he
knew Luther Goldman the refuge manager and they evidently were real close
friends of course Luther introduced me and he said this is, this is George
Saunders. You know, George has spent a lot of time in the Rio Grande Valley in
Mexico on waterfowl and also white winged doves and everything and he said,
he's just going through down here some of his records are kept out here at the
refuge headquarters and so I got talking to George Saunders and I'd heard of
him you know, he's a legend. But I, I, he was truly representive of this early
24
group of biologists. I mean he traveled all through Mexico for years under the
most imaginable difficult circumstances and everything to try to inventory
waterfowl and evaluate Mexican wetlands and of course this has all be published
now but gosh, in a minutes Dr. Saunders said to me, to me he was Dr. Saunders,
he said what are you doing tomorrow? And I said oh, I'm going out in the field
and he says, he says, why don't we go out and spend a day together? Well, if I
had anything planned the next day I readily forgot about it because I could think
of nothing I'd rather do then spend a day with George Saunders and so I did that.
I was one of the most fascinating days that I can think of and that is the only day I
ever spent with George Saunders. I never saw him after that day and just
recently because George Saunders died in February at the age of 93 I was
asked to write his obituary for the York and I just completed that. So I hope that
George Saunders and some of the things he did will be remembered perpetually.
Clarence Caughtum is, is someone you read about a great deal too and of
course he came out of Utah and he was chief of Welark research for Bureau of
biological survey and, and also into the Fish and Wildlife Service days but
Caughtum was a, was a remarkable person. He knew everything about
anything, about migratory birds and he had an enormous memory. I don't think
he ever forgot anything but he came down to the Rio Grande Valley one day and,
and he asked (inaudible) I guess he'd been referred to me because I was the
local game management agent you know, and he said, I would like to look at
some white wing dove nesting colonies and the season was, that was the proper
time of the season and everything and I, he was in the Washington office at the
25
time and I, I was just delighted you know, to be able to spend some time with him
and I said well, I'd only been in the Rio Grande Valley a short while then and I
didn't know the locations well of the nesting colonies but I knew some state, state
officers that did and I said well, Dr. Caughtum would it be okay if we could have
one of the Texas game wardens come with us tomorrow and well, he said, that'd
be wonderful. He said, I'd I'd (inaudible) enjoy the day with him and so we met
the night before in his motel and we talked about where we were going to go and
everything and so we got down to the time well, who's car are we going to take
and what time should we pick you up, Dr. Caughtum and so forth and he said
well, I understand that the white winged doves in their breeding colonies begin to
perform about, about 4:30 in the morning and it's getting a little light at that time
(inaudible) so they are going on to their breeding behavior and everything and so
he said why don't you pick me up at the hotel about 4:00 in the morning tomorrow
morning. I was watching these two Texas Fish and Game officers and they were
just absolutely devastated, devastated to begin a day at this, uncivilized hour of
4:00 in the morning. Well, if you know the folks in Texas you can't begin a day
without two scalding hot cups of coffee to begin with and you just don't gulp two
hot cups of coffee, you, you have to exchange the pleasantries of the day and
everything and breakfast with Texas folks is a leisurely exercise but anyway we
did meet Dr. Caughtum at 4:00 in the morning and I think he was satisfied and
seen what there was to see at the breeding colonies. Of course Caughtum went
on to be co-editor of the book on the white winged dove.
26
Q Well, continue your career from the work in Saskatchewan and being in
Texas and --
Well, okay for two, so for two years in 1955 and '56 I worked on the study area
there at Swift Current, okay, well, things happen on the prairies as they always
do, prairies got dry, the potholes didn't have water in the, in the spring of '57, now
that country only gets around 12 inches of precipitation a year. It is dry county
and only under the best of circumstances do the potholes really fill up so that
happened to be the situation in '57 so Crissy made the decision not to continue
the success study area but we still had the big survey banding program
underway, cooperative banding program and by cooperative I mean it was Fish
and Wildlife Service and it was volunteers or people assigned from various Fish
and Game departments, if Duck Unlimited had someone available or the
provincial people. So, the crews which were 5 to 6 people represented a broad
array of backgrounds and everything so anyway I was asked to lead the crew in
1957 through western Saskatchewan and the country was laid out in degree
blocks of latitude and longitude and our object was to band a hundred flightless
Mallards in each of these degree blocks and that's not so easily done as might
sound even though you are in the heart of the duck country because
circumstances have, have to be just right in order to catch any number of
Mallards, particularly flightless Mallards so the crew I had as I recall was a
Canadian wildlife service fellow by the name of John, I'll come up with it in a
minute, a fellow from Louisiana by the name of Mort Smith and Mort eventually
27
ended up with the Fish and Wildlife Service as head of the aerial survey crews,
same job that Jim Vozer now has and Al Cannon from the state of Ohio and
Dave Harper from Illinois, out of the Canadian wildlife service fellow was John
Hancock. And so we met Regina as usual, got our, we got our banding
equipment and everything and took off for western Saskatchewan to begin the
banding program. We had two vehicles and those were very interesting days.
We worked the same schedules everyday of the week that wasn't raining and we
were prepared to camp out if necessary but ordinarily we'd end up in a two
elevator, no, not a two elevator because that would a two elevator town ordinarily
wouldn't have a hotel but maybe a three elevator town or a four elevator town if
we were lucky and almost every town had a Chinese restaurant of course in
those days even, even Success had a Chinese restaurant , a two elevator town
had a Chinese restaurant and the food is pretty good but whatever, so, so we
worked these long hours in, in banding and trapping and the work itself was
challenging because you'd try to find a pothole that had, well you could see a
number of broods on it and hopefully Mallards and then try to figure out how to
out smart the Mallards. If you give them half a chance they'd run up the far side
and out in the prairie and be off in the pothole to the, over the hill in a, in a few
seconds. They're not adverse at all to departing the pothole, other species not
so much so.
Q So, you were dry trapping these birds as apposed to bait trapping?
28
That's right. We were dry trapping. We had equipment that we could put up very
easily and so in addition to looking for a pothole that had a trappable number of
bird, we were also looking for a pothole that had a configuration that would permit
us to set up a trap in a strategic manner that we could catch some proportion of
those bird or for example a plot of land that would go out which if you got up on
one end of the pothole and you drove the, drove the birds or scared them down
to the other end then you'd walk around and come back and drive them hopefully
into the trap you'd set in the right place. Well, it doesn't work quite like that but
quite often you would catch large numbers of birds but other times it be score,
ducks would have score ten and our crew would have zero. Don't ever
underestimate the, the wisdom of a Mallard. So, then of course bundle the
equipment up, put it back in the car and take off and hopefully, hopefully spot
another pothole. Well, we, we had some real disadvantages. I mean it just,
simply getting to areas was difficult because roads were few and far between
probably the main disadvantage was that we didn't have very good map
coverage, certainly no aerial photographs and occasionally someone in town
we'd be talking to them and they'd say oh, there's a lot of ducks out on such and
so or we'd find out how to get there. Occasionally the aerial survey crews would
drop us a note maybe or, or call us and, and tell us where there's some
prospects for catching birds. But, there's some funny, funny experiences that
come up trapping birds, up there because the population's low you never knew
who owned what piece of ground a lot of it was Crown land, it wasn't always
marked that way the private land, you didn't know who owned it or anything and
29
normally we, we would just go in and set up a trap and everything and I
remember one morning it was about 10 in the morning and we set up a dry trap
on a pothole, on the land, we didn't know who owned it or anything and we had
the ducks almost ready to go into the trap and we closed the gate of course,
always careful to do that if there's livestock around and gosh here came a,
comes a fellow in a car, a truck and he drives through the gate and storms over
there and I was able to wave him back because I was afraid he was going to
disturb the birds and they might not go into their trap. So, he understood that
much so he didn't interfere until we got the traps closed and then he got out and
he staggered, staggered over to me and he said gee are you, you folks, you folks
know whose land, whose land this is? And he was drunker then a skunk and I
said no, I said no I don't know who owns this property. And he says, well he
says, he says, it's my property, he says you don’t have permission to be out here
on my property. And I said yes we do, we have permission. And he straightened
up and he said who gave you permission to be on the property here? And I said
the Queen and he says, I can show you that and I pulled out my banding permit,
which I carried with me personally. It was a Canadian banding permit and the
letterhead of course in those days you know, it had the Queen's not logo but
whatever you'd call it in the letterhead you know, it was a very official looking
document you know and I said here, here's the permission from the Queen and
he looks at it and he shook his head and he says, okay went back got in the car
and drove away. But, but one more incident about the banding crews maybe but
we'd stay in these hopefully we'd tried to find a little town that had a, had a hotel
30
in it. Well, the hotels were generally pretty old and sort of run down and we'd
also hoped to find one that had, had a shower in it or a bathtub and hopefully,
having found that hopefully they had hot water. Well, you take, you take a
banding crew five guys that have been out there sweating and everyone badly in
need of a shower or a bath or something obviously you run out of water. So, I
mentioned Dave Harper from Illinois and Dave was the youngest of the crew so I
guess that's why he bore the brunt of everything. But to begin with he used to
ride with me and I'd, I'd put a, although I had a radio in the government car it was
not, it was for official channels in Texas and so I couldn't pick up a --
(Tape change)
Yeah we are getting ready to take a bath and a shower knowing we are going to
run out of hot water and such, oh no, wait we're back to Dave Harper because he
is the, we'll get back to Dave in a minute. Anyway Dave would ride with me and I
had another commercial radio, I could pick up a commercial radio station and
invariably Dave would turn over, he'd crank up the, crank up the radio and he
was real fan of a guy named Elvis Presley who I didn't know, I didn't know who
he was until he died you know but Elvis was just coming into his own then and
Dave was really into Elvis Presley music and he'd turn the thing up full
(inaudible) you know and so anyway there after I said, I'd always say to Dave
now, why, Dave why don't you ride in the other car here so we'd circulate around
you know and have different people so we'd all get to know each other real good
31
and boy we did get to know everyone real good at the end of the summer but
anyway I took car of the Elvis Presley problem that way. I always happened to
have some other person riding with me. Well, back to the, back to needing a
bath and a shower so we always knew we were going to run out of hot water so
one of the fellows suggested, well, because Dave would, Dave would always
beat us in there. He was really, he was real savvy that way you know, he'd go in
and usually get the first shower and so somebody didn't think that was very
democratic and so they set up a system of drawing short straws for, for the
shower. Hopefully you'd get one shower, I mean one guy would get a shower
maybe a second would but not all five or six and so anyway one of the crew
members was handling the straws that we'd draw every time and it was the
oddest thing because Dave would always draw the short straw, you know. Dave
was always the last man for the shower and he never figured that out, never
figured it out. Anyway at the end of about a month of banding waterfowl up
there you know, you got to know your crew members really well and they're some
wonderful people. We were all different of course and we had our own problems,
and we had our own attributes and everything but, but we were, there was a real
sense of camaraderie that developed and I think most of us kept in touch with
each other in the years ahead. I know I did with most of my crew members and I
bumped into them in many places there after.
32
Q Did you get any indication of band return? Were you part of that process
like they are now? How successful was the banding thing and was it sort of
reconfirming the flyways?
Yeah. Well, each, the leader of each banding crew held, held the master permit
and we'd take turns doing different things like recording data and things like that
and occasionally right at the end you know, I'd even say to one of the fellows I
said well, I think I know where I'd put a trap on this, on this pothole but where
would you put it? And occasionally we'd try it their way you know. But whatever,
but because I held the master, the banding permit then I got the returns, or the
reports of the, of the birds taken that year and the following years as long there's
a bandable population still surviving so I, that really fascinated me but (inaudible)
Pintails for example, ended up in the, in California, Grizzly Island, Sassoon
marsh, the central valley of California. I know I got a report one time of, of a
Pintail that had been shot by a fellow by the name of Lawrence Melkier, he
doesn't' t mean anything to you probably, most of you. But Lawrence Melkier
was a very famous opera tenor and evidently he's been shooting there and I sort
of regretted you know, I had his address I sort of regretted that I didn't write back
to him and try to determine what the circumstances were, whatever.
Q Were you getting compliance with returns? What percent?
33
Compliance, you mean out of the birds shot how many were actually reported by
hunters? I should say that of course most of our banded recoveries were from
hunters because that was the chief source of mortality and of course that's
always been a big question in wildlife management over the years as to what
proportion of the bird bands that people encounter maybe not necessarily shot
them but find dead birds, whatever actually end up being reported to the bird
banding laboratory and so there has been a number of band reporting studies
done and the studies at least those I'm familiar with suggested perhaps a, a third
of the banded, band recoveries were being reported at least in those days. Well,
I, the Service has changed it's policies and procedures because in those days we
didn't try unduly influence the reporting of bird bands because we didn't know
how we could do it in a universal manner throughout all the hunters in north
America for example and we could mount a publicity program in one place but
not in another and then that would skew the data so that was the reason in those
days that we didn't do that but since then there has been a change in philosophy
and there's been efforts to promote the reporting of bird bands more uniformly
and so we have some better fixes I think through placing reward bands on birds.
In other words, if a person sends in a band that has a reward on it, they may get
a monetary amount in return for it or some other kind of a prize or a gift.
Q Well, back to the, back to your career. Texas, up there in Saskatchewan
banding.
34
Okay, well, wind down the work the Game management agents have done but
when I tool the job I, I sort of thought that I'd probably not spend the whole full
career in game management not that it wasn't interesting but I was interested in
other aspects of, of waterfowl management research and in fact when I, even
before I took the job Floyd Thompson told me, he says, you know, you know, he
says what you need to do is to get your first job in an outfit and get some
experience and things and then he says, opportunities will come up in other
areas if you happened to be interested in those other areas and so I sort of
followed Floyd on that and that's the way it evolved and so anyway I was, I'd
always been interested in the prairie pothole county and I'd seen a lot of it of
course through the three summer assignments in Canada but my first
recollection of the prairie pothole country goes back to World War II days
because I was in the Navy, I'd just finished up the great lakes and I asked to be
detailed to Bermet in Washington to an aircraft carrier. I was on board a troop
train, it was in late July 1945 and we took across, took off across on the troop
train I think it was the northern Pacific and we went right through the heart of the
prairie pothole country through north Dakota and I'd read about the prairie
pothole country and everything but I'd never seen it and evidently 1945 was a
wonderful waterfowl year because I can just remember the potholes were still
brimmed full in mid summer and absolutely loaded with ducks, absolutely loaded.
Unfortunately, we don't have any survey data to verify the impression I have of,
of, of that situation but that was my first experience with the prairie pothole
country. Well, anyway I, I learned that, while I was still a game management
35
agent in Texas that a brand new program was opening up in the Dakotas and the
program related to the preservation of wetland or pothole habitat in, in the
Dakotas and Minnesota in the US portion of the prairie pothole country and a
friend that I'd gone to school with dropped me a note and he said you know,
we've got a vacancy up here and he said maybe you'd like to apply for it and I got
more information about it and I thought gee, that'd really be great, not that the
experiences in Texas weren't great, I had some wonderful, wonderful times and
days in Texas and everything but honest to God that heat and humidity down
there and the no seeums and so forth I thought we were probably due for a
change, my wife agreed with that, she'd been teaching school and everything
and we thought probably we'd spent enough time in Texas so I applied for the job
and I got it and it was stationed in Aberdeen, South Dakota and it was in what
was called then the WHP project, this is wetland habitat preservation project, it
was a new program that the service was just mounting and the reason for this
was that at the same time one part of the government, the US Fish and Wildlife
Service was interested in preserving waterfowl habitat on the breeding range
another part of the government in the department of agriculture and in the ASC
agricultural stabilization and conservation service in particular and the soil
conservation service were engaged in a program that was headed exactly the
opposite way to, to destroy wetland habitat. Well, this program had originated
back in World War II as a means of increasing food production, the rational I
guess being that by, by draining potholes and potholes have very rich soils that
additional grain or other crops could be produced for the war effort and so the
36
government was subsidizing farmers to drain potholes. There were two parts,
two so called conservation practices and one was called C-9, the C-9 which
opened drainage in this case the farmer was partially reimbursed for --
So, the farmers were reimbursed to, to drain their potholes under the C-9
practice and C-10 related to drainage, draining potholes by the use of tiles. Tile
was required for draining wetland in where the, where the rainfall precipitation
seems to be higher, up in the prairie Johnny Lynch's bald open prairie of C-9
ditches did the same job cheaper. So, here we have these two, two parts of
government operating at just opposite means. Well, this first came to light in I
believe it was 1949 when Cory Shoenfeld wrote an article for Field and Stream, it
was called "Goodbye Potholes" and Cory who was a journalism student at the
University of Wisconsin, I never had the privilege of meeting him but he did this
wonderful, wonderful article, came out in the field, he talked to, he talked to
waterfowl biologist in the Fish and Wildlife Service, he talked to state biologists,
he talked to the people in the department of Agriculture who were involved in the
program and everything and he did a wonderful piece of investigative reporting
and "Goodbye Potholes" is truly one of the most remarkable and important
pieces of popular literature in the whole era of waterfowl management and
research and I sometimes wonder how many waterfowl biologists have ever
read, particularly waterfowl biologist today have ever read "Goodbye Potholes".
So, in order to someway evaluate, better evaluate what is being done by the
Department of Agriculture and to find means of offsetting it the Fish and Wildlife
37
Service set up the WHP project in region three out of Minneapolis and the
program was under the division of river basin studies, they didn't know where
else to put it that seemed to be the most likely outfit because it was an outfit that
dealed with other Federal agencies particularly the Bureau of Reclamation and
so when I arrived on the scene the program was being administered by Warren
Nord in the regional office, he as head of river basin studies but under him was a
fellow by the name of Burt Rouse and his deputy was Ray St Orrs I worked
directly with, with Burt and Ray for seven years out of Aberdeen. Our field
stations were called area, later became known as area acquisition offices and
they were located in Devil's lake in North Dakota, Jamestown and Mynot in South
Dakota we eventually had another office in, in Hyrum and in Minnesota the
offices were in Fergus Falls and Benson. Grady Mann was in Fergus Falls and
Clyde Oden in Jamestown and Blue Madden in Devil's Lake and George Jonco
in Hyrum and those are the names that come to mind. So we were, we were
essentially given a free hand. We were not told, you know how to do this job.
We were expected to exercise whatever ingenuity we, we could to evaluate the
situation and try to figure out some solutions to it. So in the beginning we would
testify a great deal before different agricultural meetings where the various
agricultural programs were being discussed. We'd point out that there is another
side to this. You know, we're very concerned about the loss of wetlands and so
forth and I think we made some headway there. We did a lot of publicity work,
wrote a lot of articles, attended a lot of meetings promoting the value of wetlands
and although waterfowl was the primary resource we were concerned about we,
38
we recognized and tried to lead other people to understand that wetlands had far
other values too then waterfowl produced habitat for many other wildlife
creatures and we thought they served some hydrological purpose in retaining
water, not, not getting water off the land as fast as possible into the lower rivers
such as the Red river of the north and Dakota and seems to have a flooding
problem about every other year now and many of the rivers in Minnesota and in
the upper Mississippi river generally to my mind I think a lot of this flooding could
have been alleviated to a degree by retaining that water in a natural wetlands
rather then having to drain it out. So the work in Aberdeen was fascinating we,
the program shifted focus over the years to the point where we were able to offer
something affirmative, positive to farmers in a way of actually purchasing or
providing them with easements, easement payments if they would retain the
wetlands in their present condition. So, if you travel through the Dakotas
nowadays you'll see many. Many WPA signs, Wetland Prod, Wetland
Preservation areas, Fish and Wildlife Service signs and these are areas that
were evaluated and recommended for purchase by the Federal government and I
did a great deal of that work in North, northeastern South Dakota. George Juncle
did much of it in South, southeastern South Dakota and some of the people I
named did it in North Dakota and in Minnesota. So, we had an incentive to for
the farmers to consider some other use of the wetlands then, then draining them
for crops and perhaps even more important then that I think was just raising the,
the elevation of knowledge of the value of wetlands to the general public. At one
time, well back in those days people had little appreciation of, of a wetland it was,
39
it was a place where you had to drive your tractor around and hopefully nit stick
your tractor in it and I think was a, a pretty fair understanding nowadays
nationwide that wetlands are indeed some of our most productive types of habitat
and most threatened. So, we spent, Marilyn and I spent seven years in
Aberdeen on the wetlands program and raised a family in, part of a family in the
process there and the Aberdeen days were great days. We had some wonderful
times there. I was very fortunate to share an office in Aberdeen with Jerry Stout,
one of the old original flyway biologists and one of the most memorable people I
can ever imagine meeting and there's only one Jerry Stout and we visited a great
deal and I learned a great deal about wetlands in the Dakotas and also from
Jerry's work in Canada. Ray Merty was also in the office for a while and he
worked out of Northern Prairie Wildlife research center once it got set up. Well,
enjoyed the days in Aberdeen a great deal and the habitat work a great deal but
an opportunity came back to go back to Patuxent to work with Walt Crissy and
his brand new deputy a fellow by the name of Dr. Al Guise. Al Guise was the
statistician and one of the most, together they were among the most remarkable
people I've ever met in my life and so, Al Guise came out to visit us in
Minneapolis. Let me back up I missed a step. But going from Aberdeen had an
opportunity to go into Minneapolis to the regional office back in the outfit I left in
Texas and they had a job there that was called assistant regional supervisor
technical and this is chiefly a biological job in a law enforcement outfit which
sounds a little strange but law enforcement officers and game management
agents are still being used for banding and surveys and everything up to that
40
time so there was a legitimate need there they participated in winter surveys and
went to Canada and everything so it made sense in that respect and Art Hawkins
at one time held that position and Art Hawkins was still in the Minneapolis office
as Mississippi flyway biologist and so I viewed that as an opportunity to spend
some time with Art and work with him and so that was also an incentive so I, so
we moved to Minneapolis and ended up three years there and it was an
extremely busy time I learned very little about Minneapolis or St. Paul because I
was never there, I was always out in the field somewhere on some kind of a
problem or survey or something. Those were exciting days in the Fish and
Wildlife Service because new programs were being set up, the Morning dove
surveys for example were being set up nationally in a new randomized manner
and so I worked with that and the people beginning to get concerned about other
species and waterfowl beside the morning dove, a wood cock for example.
Some friends of Bob Burwell's the regional director then in Minneapolis. He
called me into his office one day and he says, you know, I've got some friends
and he says you know, they're, they're real avid wood cock hunters and they're
concerned that we don't know much about wood cock and he says they tell me
that we aught to have some kind of a workshop or something and pull together
the few people in the United States that understand or know anything about
woodcock and I wonder if you would do that, would you, would you represent me
and work with the state of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota and help
organize this woodcock gathering or something and I said sure, I'd be delighted
to do that and so I got to meet a lot of people then, interesting people work with
41
wood cock and we had the first meeting at Long lake in Minnesota and every two
to three years now there are still these woodcock workshops and they've gotten
to be big, big affairs and they put out their own publication and everything and I
think maybe we have some, we have some rough notes we may have Xeroxed
or mimeographed back about the first one but, but that was the beginning of it.
Well, anyway well, at in Minneapolis and working with surveys and everything I of
course had contact with the people back in Patuxent with Walt Crissy and Al
Guise and everything and so one day Al Guise came out and was visiting and he
said, he said why don't you come back to Patuxent we'd like to have you come
back there. He said we've got a lot of exciting things going on, going on back in
Patuxent and there's some new programs that are getting underway. We have a
position we've got we need to fill and so we talked about it, Marilyn and I and
decided well, yeah perhaps and, and talked to other people and people said well,
in your career you've got to spend a couple of years back in Washington you
know for career development if nothing else but you know, spend your time back
there a couple of years and then he says you go back in the field and everything.
Well, it really doesn't work that way. So, I said well, well, Patuxent's not
Washington DC, oh, that's alright experience is all the same. They count
Patuxent is the same as experiencing Washington, DC, see? But --
Okay, we're back to Minneapolis again and the busy life there but one of the, one
of the key problems during the three years in Minneapolis was Canada geese
and particularly the Canada geese in the Mississippi valley population. These
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are geese that breed up on the western side of Hudson Bay and they, they
migrate down through Wisconsin and winter in Illinois, southern part of Illinois,
crab orchard and Horseshoe lake area but this is a population it's been studied
over the years on this, it's a population that attracts an awful lot of hunting
pressure and wildlife populations tend to react to changes in the environment and
as did the Canada Geese in the Horacan, around the refuge there that farmers
planted more and more corn and geese learned how to capitalize on the corn to
the extent of actually pulling it off, off the stocks. So, geese lingered in
Wisconsin longer and longer periods of time and arrived in Illinois later and later
and of course with more geese around for longer periods of time in Wisconsin the
harvest of those geese kept mounting to the concern of, of, of Illinois and each of
the states had a theoretical goose harvest quota that Wisconsin was only to
have, have so many geese shot and as in Illinois and that this would be in line
with population objections and no harvested, over harvest would occur. Well,
over harvest occurred everywhere because there is no real mechanism for
determining how many geese were being actually taken by the hunters so one of
the jobs I had in Minneapolis was to set up some set of sort of an effective quota
system and after many, many years of state efforts to try to give some meaning
to the state quotas the decision was finally made for the Federal government to
administer the goose harvest system in Wisconsin. We would, we would permit
the, determine the number of permits and set up the mechanism and everything
for the distribution of permits in cooperation with the Wisconsin Department of
Fish and Game and this was done on a computer basis so it was really my first
43
experience in working with computers and, which was an eye opener and it was
one of the earliest applications I believe to the use of computers in regulating
harvest of waterfowl. Well, it wasn't a hundred percent ses, successful but it did,
it did give a better control of, of insurance on the quotas then we'd had before but
in the mean time with more and more geese at Horack and this cause more local
problems, more concerned on the part of Illinois and other states that harvested
these geese and everyone agreed that there is simply too many geese in
Horacan and how to, how to lessen the number of geese and get them moving
on their way down south and so I looked into other mechanisms in cooperation
with other people as to how we could better disburse and reduce the number of
geese and, and some places harassment or driving geese, physically driving
them would lesson the attractiveness and that they'd eventually move onto other
places so the Service made a, I say very reluctantly a decision to harass the
geese at Horacan and so the Service mounted an all out program there by
bringing in pilots, refuge pilots, flyway biologist pilots and gathering together
propane cannons and other things that are used for harassing geese and well,
we did cause quite a stir there I can assure you. A lot of geese got up in the air,
a lot of them came back where they were, the program ran over probably over
ten days the best I can recall. In the process of course, a lot of the Wisconsin
goose hunters got concerned about this, driving geese away would lessen their
opportunities to hunt geese not that they didn't have a lot of opportunity or more
then their opportunity anyway, became a great big political hot potato and it was
culminated then in the state of Wisconsin driving out, the Attorney General,
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assistant Attorney General and several of his aids and other very, very important
folks in Madison we were told came out in a caravan, served papers on the Fish
and Wildlife Service people involved in the harassment program including myself
and we were hauled down to Beaver Dam and made an appearance before a
state judge down there. We were charged with harassing geese without the
consent of the state of Wisconsin and of course Federal laws always take
precedent, rules and regulations always take precedent over state regulations
and everything so we, we recognize that nothing really was going to happen out
of all this and it was a chiefly a publicity measure probably one that the state if
they really new the details would be reluctant to participate in but anyway the
harassment program ran on and I, I was responsible for writing an evaluation and
report of the thing and I, I do not think it was very successful I think there were
probably other mechanisms that could have been taken for it but at least we
tried, tried something that hadn't been proven before, probably habitat lessening
the attractiveness of the Horacon area from an agricultural standpoint would
have been a far more important --
(Next tape)
Q You were writing a report about harassment and –
Yeah, and but, but you look at it from a practical standpoint you know, you tell
farmers you’re planting too much corn out here, you aught to cut back you corn
45
acreage in, you know half. You know, that’s sort of, sort of a foulesy you see, we
wildlife's drift into all the time. We look at a wildlife problem and we come up with
a solution to it from the view point of wildlife and really there’s not much
consideration about all the other factors that relate to this ever becoming a
practicality. I don’t know how many times I’ve read research, you read research
reports on and they propose something for the benefit for whatever the particular
wildlife problem is and, and the thing is totally, totally unrealistic, it’s dreaming on
cloud nine but anyway back to the point. So, anyway the harassment program at
Horkan and did draw a lot of attention, the everyone recognized that there was
indeed a problem there and the states participated there after a lot better and
enforcement other quotes. The overall end of it I think was positive in terms of
benefit to the, to the resource. If you remember, now we’re talking about 1966 I
guess it was you know, we were in the Vietnam, Vietnam war then –
Q ’64.
’64, okay, had begun at ’64. No, I was in Horkan, we were in Minneapolis ’65
though ’67. Well, whatever it was. We were in war with, in Vietnam and the
Milwaukee journal always had a great cartoon and I remember the one that
shows, it shows LBJ at his desk and he has Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamara before him and on LBJ’s desk is a globe of the world and it’s turned
around so that the United States is on view and right were Wisconsin would be
there is a little puff of smoke going up and LBJ is looking at Bob McNamara and
46
he says, Bob how many troops can we sent to Horkan. I’ve got that in here
somewhere. Well to close out the Horkan matter, about 5 months after all the
harassment had ceased and every thing we got papers from the state of
Wisconsin which officially, officially withdrew the charges against us for harassing
geese in Wisconsin without state permit.
Q And then you went on to Patuxent?
Yeah, okay Patuxent. So, we’re still in Minneapolis and Al Guise came out as a
recruiting trip I guess because he wanted us to go back to the Patuxent and work
with these new programs and everything. One of the new programs was called
the accelerated research program and this was to benefit further research on the
migratory game birds that weren’t waterfowl. Over the years the great bulk of the
Services attention, money and resources has always gone into waterfowl which
is proper I think but on the other hand, other res, other species such as the
mourning dove, woodcock snipe, fan tailed pigeon and so forth were being
overlooked. The Service doing virtually little about these so, a group of
concerned people including citizens and sportsman got together and prevailed
upon Congress to make a special appropriation of I believe it was one point eight
million dollars to further research on the non-waterfowl migratory game birds.
We always have problems describing this group of birds, some people call them
migratory upun and mig, upun and shore birds and different handles but we don’t
have a good designation for them so I’ll just call them non-waterfowl although it is
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a negative connotation so, so here the Service is, it’s confronted with this brand
new appropriate of one point eight million dollars and part of it was ear marked
for research studies to be undertaken by the states and part of it to be done by
the Fish and Wildlife Service and how, how do you distribute this, this pot of
money in a useful and meaningful way so that was the job I got into upon getting
back to Patuxent. My title was really Chief of Migratory shore up and game bird
studies. But this is a big part of the job that first year and so, it meant a lot of
meetings with people state and state people and Federal people and the various
associations of state fish and game commissioners and the international
association of so four from, so we laid out criteria as to the types of research that
were needed and how interested states could apply for grants under the program
and what the reporting requirements were and things of that sort and so that was
quite interesting , it involved a lot of travel around the country and so we got the
program off and running and it is still in existence but I don’t believe it’s funded
very well or certainly not satisfactory at this point. So, after a while there working
with, with Al, with Al Guise’s and Walt Crissy’s director for the migratory birds
population station we were in Snowden Hall, this is where we are located and
Snowden hall is, have you been to Patuxent? Alright, Snowden Hall is the old,
the old plantation building. It’s a single floor building, old brick colonial type
building and do you know the story of Snowden? Snowden is now a two story
building but if you look at the, look at the bricks on the outside of Snowden Hall
you can see that the original building was one story and in other words, a second
floor has been put on top of Snowden Hall and the story tell back there is that
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when Mrs. Snowden moved out there to occupy the, this plantation she was very
put out that the, well people of our standing don’t live in single floor dwellings,
you know you have to have a second floor if you’re going to be anybody very
important and so there upon a second floor was added to Snowden and if you
visit Patuxent you can see where that change in roof line has been made.
Anyway, we were extremely cramped because more and more people were
being brought on board. Walt Crissy was devising all sorts of new programs, a
parts collection survey for example, where hunters would send in duck wings or
goose tails and techniques have been found by Sa, Sam Carnie and others
working with him as to how to identify not only the species of bird of course from
a wing, we’re talking about ducks now but, but also the sex of it and in many
cases also the age of it. So we’re beginning to understand the population
dynamics, have a little more background on this and let me say that I’ve never
met anyone I don’t think with the insight that Crissy had into what really makes
the north American waterfowl duck resource click. He had amazing perspectives
and he’s innovative in how to, how to address those issues. He perfected the,
the breeding ground surveys that the flyway biologists participate in now and the
winter surveys and, and these new parts collects surveys. Also, a hunter harvest
survey that was based upon a sampling of persons who buy duck stamps, so
called duck stamps so that there is a nationwide randomized semi-randomized
matter of gathering basic data on duck populations well, simply stated production
of a resource has to equal that resources mortality, that is the bottom line of any
wildlife population but involved in it of course or well how does mortality takes its
49
shape, what causes it? Is it controllable? Is there anything you can do about the
thing and this responsibility is particularly important I think when we’re talking
about a, a mortality that is permitted by the Federal government namely hunting.
So, we had a high obligation in that respect and Crissy had a wonderful insight
into how these various pieces would fit together. In fact, I don’t it’s generally
known but after Walt Crissy analyzed the population of fall flight and the
regulations have been set every year he put together his estimate as to what the
breeding population survey the following year would show and this was put into a
sealed envelope and a copy was given to the director and I do not know of any
accounting you know, the following year after the surveys have been taken as
exactly how Crissy’s estimates compared with, with what the survey data
reflected. I’ve heard Walt talk about it on occasion that we missed it by two
million Mallards or something in the breeding survey but there’s always an
explanation. There was always an explanation as to why it didn’t come out you
know, pretty much in line with his, his estimates but from what I know I think he, I
think he must have been fairly close a lot of times in those estimates. I don’t
think that story’s ever been told. And I’ve never seen, I’ve never seen his
estimates and I don’t know much more about it then what I’ve related.
Q It’s a little more formal now, I mean we actually make projections now that
are more public.
50
That’s right you know, we never projected that the fall flight was going to be one
hundred and ten million birds for example and people always ask that question
and that was the most disturbing question to answer because well, we didn’t
have the mechanism for doing that but, but we have a much better insight into
things nowadays I think. Well, anyway one of the exciting things at Patuxent was
the advent of the computer and the computer arrived just, I think it was a matter
of weeks if not months, I don’t think it was months ago and it was an IBM 360
Model 20, it’s a great thing, it’s a great new machine we have over here. A fellow
by the name of Manny Vearo was in charge of the, what we called the ADP
section and the, the name was eventually changed to EDP, electronic data
processing and some people would call it the eventual data processing section
but before that everything was done, all the data were on punch cards, tons and
tons and thousands of punch cards, tons of punch cards, drawers, boxes
everywhere, punch cards everywhere you look were punch cards and so they
were fed through the counter and then you’d have to resort them to find
something else ungodly, ungodly mess you know to really try to process any
amount of data, so the advent of the computer was really something special and
there’s another great thing that happened and we got these huge machines, they
looked like suitcases and these were electronic calculators, they weighed about
70 or 80 pounds. The, I know, I know the gals in the office that often did the
tabulation, they were too heavy for them to lift so whenever they wanted them
moved, when they moved they’d always have to find a mail around somewhere
to help them and these were great machines, these were Cathogreytubes and
51
you looked at this wonderful display of the figures up here and you could punch
it, punch things into the keyboard and they’d change up here on the screen and it
was just absolutely magnificent. Well, the problem was they did four things, they
added, the subtracted, they divided and they multiplied. They did no other
function. They did no more then today’s hand held calc, not that much, not
nearly that much, hand held calculator and back in those days a real problem,
always a problem, was just the simple arathmatic error by, by doing all these
calculations manually you always had to double check it and you have someone
else double check. You know, does this string of numbers add up and
everything? I mean that was an enormous, enormous handicap and the frightful
thing is how many errors slipped by and lead to some consequential decision you
know that really was wrong. I don't know of any first hand cases off hand but I'm
sure there must have been some around. So, just going from mechanized
calculations to, to the computer was something enormous not that computers
don't make mistakes but the computer mistakes are mistakes made by humans
working with the computer. It's nice to blame the computer but you dig a little
deeper you're going to find a human hand behind it somewhere. Well, of course
we found out shortly that the model 20 was not capable of handling the data we
had it far exceeded that and we called in an IBM under contract and asked us to
look at, to look at the system there at Patuxent and make recommendations and
so IBM sent in a crew and they, they met with all the folks there, people in the
banding office and people involved in the surveys and all the rest of it and they
said you know, you people have one of the most complicated data systems we've
52
ever seen, said we just can't, we can just hardly comprehend the complexities of
the, of the statistical problems that you're confronted with and, and trying to
develop regulations for hunting waterfowl and other game birds, they were just
absolutely astounded with the complexity of the program and everything. Well,
fortunately the Fish and Wildlife Service and out group out there at Patuxent
wasn’t the only one that had problems with the computer and so this ended up
with the Department of Interior setting up a computer system and they ended up
with this huge, huge machine, it was an IBM 360 model 65 what ever that was,
but it could do a great deal more then we could but, so we would send down jobs
and they were on computer tapes, down to Interior, we had a courier, that was
his main business would take these tapes down to Washington, DC and wait
around while they process the jobs and everything and bring them back and of
course when you are working in a big agency like that different agent, different
parts of the agency have competing interests and needs. So, we're talking about
priorities now and you're talking about expensive, high costs and so we'd usually
run our jobs, the big jobs at night, it was a differential charge, you where they had
to have it back the same day or whatever and so we'd try to economize by, by
running our stuff in the evening, send it down in the afternoon by courier and pick
it up the next morning and that was the way it was working when I left there and
since then I don't know how many generations of computers the both the
Patuxent and the Department of Interior have gone through but I'm sure it's very,
very many but anyway it's fascinating in those days working with that sort of stuff.
53
I'd like to say a little bit about the division of management enforcement but it too
evolved over the years, particularly that the emphasis became more towards law
enforcement and less towards the management activities that their people would
participate in the past. This has both it's good and bad aspects of course, you
know, it probably made for a more sophisticated law enforcement, a concern was
coming up about the endangered, endangered species and, and unlawful
international trade and so there was a real need for a division of management
enforcement or branch of management enforcement to change and so it
eventually became the division of, of law enforcement and probably Clark Bavin
the Chief was instrumental in that but the, but the professionalism of, of service
enforcement officers became higher I think they were able to spend a much
higher part of their time in true enforcement activities, these have been
complicated by a number of things like I mentioned endangered species act and
sitees and some of the other regulations that gave the Federal government more
authority in terms of wildlife importation and preservation. Likewise, things
changed from the management standpoint. Walt Crissy's migratory bird
population station which I went to work under existed there at Patuxent for I'm
guessing maybe 10 or 12 years and but we knew we saw changes there also
and so eventually the name migratory bird population station was changed to the
office of migratory bird management, it's located in Washington. Although Crissy
was located at Patuxent he spent a great deal of time in Washington in meetings
and things was quite unhandy at least in terms of the Washington people to have
the migratory bird population people out there in the countryside, they wanted
54
them in closer. Also some of the legislation had changes, in the of setting
regulations for example. We had to react to, to the impacts of the endangered
species program. There became what is called section seven consultation, that
before we can set up, establish the waterfowl regulations each year. We have to
go into a consultation with their office of endangered species to determine that
none of the actions that we are prosing to do in terms of hunting migratory game
birds had any impact on any species that have been designated as threatened or
endangered. Another change was NEPA, National Environmental Procedures
Act. This set out the means by which the Federal government establishes
regulations. It declares that the meetings will be open to the public, it will be
advertised so that the public can attend. There’s certain steps that require even
after the regulations are proposed for people to, to respond and to evaluate them
before the final regulations are promulgated. The whole series of things like this
that, that came into being that greatly complicated the, the job of managing North
American waterfowl and setting regulations and a lot of these had legal
consequences so there’s a, there’s a justification for, for having sourcers at hand
to review the various required documents, things of that sort. So, after Walt
Crissy retired the office of migratory, migratory management, bird management
under Dr. John Rogers was, was established and so John’s office was moved
down to the interior building and I stayed at Patuxent as, as his assistant for two
or three years as I recall and eventually moved down to Washington myself and
my job then was Chief of the branch of operations in the office of migratory bird
management and in that job I had I suppose probably two primary
55
responsibilities, one was as a supervisor to the flyway representatives, I should
say something about them but these are key people. One assigned to each of
the four flyways, the Atlantic, Mississippi, central and pacific. These are the key
people that represent the Fish and Wildlife Service in migratory bird matters and
including the regulatory matters and that was a, an extremely simple job from my
aspect because we had such competent people in those jobs, we had Ed Addy
and, and Warren Byrondon and Jerry Saree in now in the Atlantic flyway position
and we had, we had Art Hawkins and then Ken Gamble came along as the
representative for the Mississippi flyway and then we had, in the central flyway
we had Ray Bower and later Harvey Miller and in the Pacific flyway John Shatten
who was followed by, by Jim Bartnick. These are all solid, competent people and
the amount of supervision and problems that that part of the job entailed was
pretty minimal. It was, we had a wonderful working relationship there I guess.
And the second part of the job as chief officer of the branch of operations was the
regulatory procedure and as enjoyable as the other part of the job was, this is
just as much the opposite. A series of regulations and meetings and procedures
and everything on a very, very tight budget, everything under stress. Once the
biological data had been assembled and evaluated and made available to
everyone then, then we had to begin a series of meetings in house and also
meetings with the various flyway technical committees and flyway councils and
public meetings require under NEPA and doing all the consultations under the
endangered species act and it just, and meetings with the office of migra, of
management and budget for example. I remember one year when a President
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came in and his message was, we’re going to abolish as many Federal
regulations as we can. Let’s get rid of them. So, in due time we got a message
that we were due for a meeting with the office of management and budget
because office of management and budget was proposing to eliminate the
regulatory procedures and process for setting regulations. Little did they
recognize that under the treaties that we had with Canada and Mexico and so
forth, migratory birds, the designated migratory birds are totally protected.
There’s no taking of them. There are no seasons on them. There’s no hunting
permitted on them unless the Secretary of the Interior specifically provides for
such taking. So, if the regulations were prohibited, withdrawn, no longer used
anymore, this meant that that was the end of all migratory bird hunting in the
United States as well as other permitted uses of the resource. So, we met over
there with management, people in the office of management and budget and
they started out real gung ho, yep we want to get rid of your regulations and so
forth and it took a long, long time to explain to them that in truthfulness the
migratory bird hunting regulations are permissive, they permit, permit the uses of
these, of the resource for human. Without the regulations there would be no use
of migratory birds. It was totally, they had a totally, they held the usual, they held
the usual position with regard to most regulations which was right but ours was
just the opposite and it took a long, long time to bring them around to the point to
understand that and I, in fact, I remember one time some individual and I’m not
going to name him or myself, said if you want to see pure hell, if you want to see
pure hell, you shut the hunting seasons on migratory game birds. You may have
57
thought I said that but I, I’m not going to admit that. So, that was a very stressful
job in setting the annual, helping set the annual hunting regulations understand I
had no part in what most of the decisions were, those decisions were made
elsewhere but I did handle the, pulling together the information for the Federal
registry which is the Federal government official means of advising the public
what it intends to do or is doing.
Q You wanted to talk about
Well, yeah I’d like to say, just some comments generally about the Directors,
wonderful Directors we had back when I was working not to, not to negate the
present ones because I don’t know anything about them but we had some really
dedicated professional people and there was Len Greenwalt and Dan Jansen
and John Gachuck and I have got a real warm heart in, place in my heart for
John Gachuck and I think a lot of Fish and Wildlife Service people do but was a
true professional and he is, he accomplished so much, so much during the days
that he was regional, regional director first in Boston and then director of the Fish
and Wildlife service in Washington. I, he was a gentleman of the highest order
and I don’t think there are many employees that worked during his days that just
wouldn’t give their utmost to help John in any way possible but I think one of the
things I remember about him most was when I was still under Minneapolis
regional office and Dan Jansen had stepped down as regional director and we
understood a new gentlemen by the name of John Gachuck at least he’s new to
58
me but not to a lot of other people had been appointed director of the, of the Fish
and Wildlife Service and we had noticed that he was going to be in the
Minneapolis regional office next week, their regional director was Bob Burwell
and Bob sent out a notice that he expected all employees that could possibly
leave their job to spend part of the afternoon with John Gachuck during his visit
and so we of course are anxious to meet the new director and so the meeting
came off and John got up there and he says, folks he says, I know a lot of you
and a lot of you I don’t know but he said I’m John Gachuck and for better or
worse he says, I’m, I’m your knew director but he said, you know you’re not going
to hear much from me about what I think our mission ought to be. He said I’ll
give a few words, some ideas and so forth but he said, I’m here chiefly to listen to
you and so John spoke for 15 or 20 minutes and he stopped and he says now,
he says I’m, I’m the listener, the floor is yours, and he said you can ask any
question you want and I’ll do my best to, to answer it and of course, he says, you
know I can’t, I won’t be able to answer some of them because I don’t know the
answers to them yet but he said I want you to, I want to hear from you as to what
you think our Fish and Wildlife should do. What are we doing good? Where can
we make improvements? He said, he spoke a great deal about the
responsibility, the great responsibility he felt as being director and the obligations
that the Fish and Wildlife Service had and it was one if the most memorable
occasions during the years I’m familiar with, with the Service was to have John
out there that day. And John visited every regional office that week. He went
from one to the other and he had exactly the same sort of meeting and I can tell
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you that at the end of that week he had, he had the troops one thousand percent
behind him. And John had a remarkable memory of facts and people and places
and at that meeting I, I had the occasion to, after his meeting in Minneapolis I
had the occasion to go up and visit briefly with him, with everyone else in the
regional office and so a few months after that I transferred to Patuxent and
Marilyn and I were unfamiliar with the DC area and everything but there was a
big controversy going on about the location of, is was a super highway or
interstate or something in Virginia and there was a lot of concern about it
because this is going to go through not only an area of very expensive
residences but their civil war trenches along the same site and one person in
particular had a renowned azalea garden and the highway is to go right through,
right through this particular property and so we read that, that anybody that
wanted to could come out, come out and view this site where the highway was
going to go and Marilyn and I thought well, let’s run down there and look at this
and look at the civil war trenches and everything and we pulled up there and
looked around and walked back to get in our car and a car drove up, it was John
Gachuck and his wife, Edith and John got out of the car walked over called me
immediately, immediately by name and said I’d like you to meet my wife here and
I’ve meet your wife and we exchanged greetings and everything but how possibly
he could remember a name just coming out a group of hundreds of people and I
was in the wrong place, why should I be there? Why should he be there? The
circumstances just crazy but he had that wonderful, wonderful knack of
connecting with people and he, and he had a wonderful sense of judgment and
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making, making decisions of the most difficult kind that were probably the best
that could be made under the circumstances.
Q John had a very competent staff I think.
That right he had total confidence in his people. You know, he’d recognize them
as professionals and they gave him the very best professional guidance that they
possibly could and being director is an extremely difficult job with political
pressures from the hill and the President’s office and so forth and, and John
always stuck by his guns whatever he finally concluded was the right thing to do,
that’s what John Gachuck did.
Q Okay, Milt.
Okay, you know sometimes I’m asked, I’m asked the question well, gee what
would you do different if, if you had to do it all over again and gosh, in all
truthfulness I’m speaking of Fish and Wildlife days but also the, even the days in
Idaho and everything and I, I just feel so, so privileged to have had the
opportunity and oh, in a couple, several respects of course working, working with
the resource and, and the work generally being so enjoyable and hopefully
productive, you feel like maybe you’ve, you’ve accomplished a little bit anyway.
I, at least that was the feeling back in the old days when individuals could make
individual contributions and I recognize that circumstances make that quite
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different now that you know, we’re probably more grouped and specialist
(inaudible) we tend to be more genoas we knew a lot of things about broad
things and not to much about anything in particular and I suspect that today
we’re, we’ve become more specialized, more folks out here that know a great,
great deal about little slivers of information but I, I wonder how it all fits together
and I, I think, I’m not negating that in anyway but very specialized information like
that I think has to be brought together, assimilated in and lead to some
comprehensive overall objective or solution to problems and but personally
working for the Fish and Wildlife Service has been so rewarding, it’s given me the
opportunity to meet so many fine people and friendships that have endured over
the years and to visit many, many places I’d never gone to before and including
foreign counties and foreign assignments and I, there’s some things I guess, you
know, I probably would have done a little bit different but by in large it’s been an
enormously satisfying career.
Q What are you proudest about? What’s your legacy?
Professionally or what?
Q Professionally.
Well, there have been several things. I don’t know which one would be, I’d single
out maybe but I, I enjoyed the wetlands program a great deal because hopefully
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the areas that were set aside, purchased will be something that will be held in
perpetuity for, for the betterment for north American waterfowl. I, many, many of
the research accomplishments folks, I’m not degrading what the
accomplishments are but sometimes they don’t seem to have enduring benefits
maybe like something physical like a wetland out there. I enjoyed working with
Graham Cooch of the Canadian Wildlife Service in apply satellite imagery for
monitoring snow conditions on the breeding grounds of the arctic nesting and sub
arctic nesting geese and Bob Monroe from the Wildlife group out of Patuxent was
involved in that. He’d been doing some other use of satellite imagery for, for his
studies and we got thinking about it that, what would these imageries, images
show in terms of snow condition in the arctic we knew from experience that arctic
nesting geese tend to go though years of boom and bust, they have great
production years and they have poor production years or virtually no production
years and a lot of that seemed to be, we thought oriented to, to the advent
disappearance of snow at a, at a critical time in the biological aspect goose
production. Were the breeding grounds clear of snow and ice at the time when
the geese had to begin nesting because of the shortness of the season up there.
There’s a given time when they must begin if they’re going to produce, incubate
the eggs produce the eggs and rear them to flight stage. They themselves go
through molt and be able to depart before another winter sets in on the arctic.
Well, we knew quite a bit about, the Canadians in particular knew quite a bit
about dates of when nesting should start in different areas and so we used some
of those dates which generally arranged around June the 15th and so we ordered
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satellite imagery through NASA and began to systematically look at some of the
breeding, major breeding grounds on Hudson Bay and Banks Island and, and the
Alaska coast and other places and of course we don’t see geese on satellite
pictures but we can tell whether the breeding grounds have got snow cover or
not and so I think to some extent we were able to understand the years and
predict the years when goose production was likely to be bad. We could never
do the other aspect of it, how good would success be. We could never get to
that point, you need ground truthing in order to make that sort of an adjustment
but, but I think at that time it was sort of an exciting project to work on to be able
to use satellite imagery for a very practical part of the north American goose
management.

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Milt Reeves
I'm Milt Reeves. Most people know me by that but Milt happens to be my middle
name. My name is really Henry M. but I prefer Milt and it's a pleasure here to be
here this morning and talk about, hopefully a little bit about the old days of the
waterfowl surveys and other waterfowl matters but I've been retired since 1983
from the Fish and Wildlife Service and I suppose that makes me an old timer but
I really don't think of myself in that respect nor as a pioneer in, in the north
American waterfowl program because so many other people did so much way,
way ahead of anything I may have done but I, I guess I should start something
about my resume. I was raised in New Jersey and I don't tell many people that
but now all of you folks know that and after World War II serving a little time in
the Navy and with the advent of the GI bill I decided to go to school as a forester.
I was always very much interested in hunting and particularly waterfowl hunting
but I had no idea that there's such a thing as a collage degree in wildlife. So, I
thought well, the next best thing probably is to become a forest ranger of some
sort and schools are extremely difficult to get into in those days after World War II
because everyone had the same objective I did, to get a college degree and
hopefully find some experience after that, that would be worthwhile. So, I applied
for a number of schools and I ended up being accepted first at Utah State
University at that time it was Utah State agricultural college and while I was in the
Navy I had a good friend from Utah and he talked about the beauty of Utah
many, many times and I'd never been there but what I had the choice of choosing
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between the schools I thought gee, why not give Utah state a try and so I did and
I had an old 1935 Chevy that I just overhauled the engine on and took off with a
few possessions to Logan, Utah and I'll never forget coming up over the summit
there between Brigham City and Logan and looking out over cash valley, I
thought what a beautiful, beautiful place this is and it's always been one of my
very favorite places, the setting of Logan in the Cash valley and the school
campus, absolutely beautiful but anyway after entering school there I soon found
that, well, my gosh you know, you don't have to be a forest ranger because we
offer wildlife management degrees and I was just absolutely elated and so I
switched my major from, from forestry into school of or department of wildlife and
at that time Jeff Slow, Dr. Jeff Slow is the leader of the Utah cooperative wildlife
research unit and I always tried to spend as much time as I could with Jeff, he
was an absolute fountainhead of knowledge about waterfowl because he'd done
his PHD degree at, at Iowa state on the Red Head Duck and I just by
happenstance, I couldn't have ended up I don't think at a better school as far as
my personal interests were concerned and then on top of that were the Great
Bear River marshes and the other fine marshes there in northern Utah so I think I
had just a splendid time there, under graduate work at the Utah agricultural
college and I graduated there in 1950. Well, upon finishing a degree I guess
somebody feels that you aught to get out and do something worthwhile and find a
job. Well, all of my friends in wildlife were going to become researchers and
although I was interested in research I thought it seemed to be a sort of a narrow
type of position to take upon just beginning in wildlife so I kept an open mind and
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finally ended up accepting a job at the, for the Idaho department of fish and game
in American Falls, Idaho in southeastern part of the state as a conservation
officer. Well, the duties of a conservation officer are largely law enforcement
oriented but in Idaho as did in many other states they capitalize upon their
conservation officers or whatever they maybe called, these are the work people,
this is the man power that's draw upon when big jobs have to be done and
they're located throughout the state, they're readily available and I think most of
the conservation officers even though they may be a bit law enforcement
oriented primarily they enjoyed these other jobs too and so at American Falls I
was able to participate in dove call count surveys and the pheasant surveys,
winter deer counts, waterfowl surveys, banding waterfowl, many, many things
and I've always looked back upon those days in American Falls as just a
splendid, splendid background to learn what wildlife management was all about.
So, I spent two years in American Falls as a conservation officer and then Bob
Saughter who was the state waterfowl biologist out of Boise took me aside one
day and he said you know, have you ever thought about going back and doing
some graduate work and I said well, yeah it's been at the back of my mind to do
that and he says you have an interest in, in waterfowl, correct? I said, absolutely,
I said that's what my life revolves around the most waterfowl and wetlands. Well,
he says we have, we're beginning a Pitman Roberson project in the southeastern
part of the state on an area called Digham marsh. It's a sixteen thousand acre
marsh at the upper end of Bear lake which straddles the border between Idaho
and Utah and he said, would you consider, would you be interested in doing the
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field work that we'd like to have done over there and he says perhaps you know,
he said you could use that for your graduate work too and immediately I was
interested in that and at first I thought about going to the University of Idaho, in
fact I'd already been accepted there for graduate work but I thought gee, that's in
another part, that's practically in another state and people in Idaho tell you that
we have two states, one is the southern part and then there's the totally detached
part up there at the north, up in the pan handle and at that time you couldn't drive
through the state of Idaho to get to the north part of the state, you had to detour
off on a road into Washington State and I think that probably has been corrected
since but anyway on second thought I thought perhaps Logan would be the best
place to go back to. I, I know the folks back there, down there, they know me, it's
handy, it's close by. These instructors and Jeff Slow are more oriented in the
waterfowl and wetlands then are the people in the faculty up the, up at Boscow,
Idaho. So, I made plans then to, to go back down to Logan. Well, my graduate
program was sort of screwy because I did my fieldwork before I did my academic
work. Gee, I could, I could, I could do the field work and get down there and
fuck, fuck my graduate, my course work, that thought did occur to me. But
anyway the graduate school down there with a bit of reluctance said yeah, okay
go ahead, do your field work and we'll take a chance with you and you're taking a
chance with us and we hope you have a good academic year when you come
down here to do your graduate work and finish up your dissertation, not
dissertation but thesis and so I did that for two years. Marilyn and I were married
them and we lived in Mount Puluer and that's in the Bear lake valley, a high
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altitude, 6000 foot western valley. The winters are long, long, long and the
summers are short and bitter cold and deep snows and we lived in a 20 foot
trailer, 20 foot long trailer, no indoor plumbing if you understand what I mean. It
was a very cold walk on a bitter cold winter day to the toilet which was about 20
yards away and we had a single kerosene stove in the trailer and we lived two
years that way, two winters. Well, the marsh itself is called Digham marsh and it
adjoins the Bear river which originates in Wyoming flows into, I'm sorry it
originates in Utah, flows into Wyoming into Idaho and back into Utah, empties
into the Great Salt Lake and in the process providing water to the Great Bear
river marshes. The state wanted a overall ecological study done of the marsh,
no one had worked on it much. There were a number of problems associated
with it. The main one probably being that President Garfield back in the, back in
the mid 1850's had granted to the Utah power and light company storage rights
to use Digham marsh and also joining Bear Lake, Bear lake itself as storage for
spring run off coming down the Bear river. The water was diverted through a
canal into Digham marsh and of course the current flow of the water slowed
there, so it deposited a great amount of silt in the marsh and then when the water
was still high it was funneled off into Bear lake. Well, later in the summer the
water, water problem reversed, the lake was still high, the marsh had dried up
pretty much, the Bear river was way down and so the waters returned from, was
thought Bear lake during exceptional years but usually the water is pumped
through a pumping station there on the edge of the lake into the marsh and then
flowed by gravity down the rainbow canal back into the, into the Bear river and so
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as an exchange of water into the marsh, into the lake, out of the lake and into the
marsh and on down the river, depending on whether it was spring or fall. Well, of
course this went through great fluctuations in the water level in the marsh itself
so there was a lot of concern about what this meant to waterfowl and there were
a fair number of geese nesting in the marsh. Bob Saughter told me when I
moved down there, if you find 100 goose nests he says, he says I just think that'd
be wonderful we don't, we hope there is that many geese there. Well, I think we
found, I found 125, the first year and as people suspected the geese that are
nesting on elevated area, when the water comes up and it was coming up during
the incubation period. These nests could very easily be flooded out and I did find
a few nests flooded out that first year but by in large most of the geese got off
successfully. There are a number of waterfowl, ducks that nested on the marsh
also and so I did a great deal of studies, nesting studies of the waterfowl and --
Well, to make a long story short after the field work was finished and I
concentrated chiefly on waterfowl production and harvest and also muskrat
production and harvest and a degree was accepted and I obtained the Master's
of Science degree there at Logan. I, I again had an important choice to make, go
back to the state of Idaho where I had a job up at the Alfred and Cort Awayne
way up in the north part of the state or maybe try something different. When in
the process I met a fellow by the name of Floyd Thompson who is a game
management agent and working for the Fish and Wildlife Service and he was in
charge of the state of Utah and I remember he came up one day and he said, he
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came over to visit our trailer and he, he said you know, what are you planning to
do? And I said well, I'm not absolutely certain. Well, he said, I'd like to interest
you in a job, an opportunity, he said I can't offer you the job but I could tell you of
some opportunities that exist. And I said well, I'm, I'm ears what are they? Well,
he said you know, because you've had law enforcement experience and with the
state of Idaho two years, you qualify for a position at US game and management
agent, you have to have two years of law enforcement experience and he said
we have two vacancies open in the Albuquerque region which is the
southwestern region of the Fish and Wildlife Service that he worked out of and he
said one job is in Tulsa, Oklahoma and he said the other job is in a new station
that we intend to open up in the lower route, Rio Grande valley in a place called
Harlington and I said well, tell me about both areas I've been in neither. Well, he
said let me tell you about Harlens in Texas and he says you may not what to
hear about the, about Tulsa, Oklahoma if I understand correctly, you are
interested in waterfowl. But he said Harlington is near Brownsville and he said of
near there is the Great Laguna Madre, this wonderful, wonderful water, waterfowl
wintering area that extents for 125 miles up the lower coast of Texas and he said
this is where mostly Red head ducks in North America winter. He said we don't
know how many are there but we think probably, probably three quarters of all
the wintering Red heads (inaudible) in one point in the Laguna Madre of Texas.
And he said, what people don't realize of course, of course are the enormous
numbers of Pintails that also winter there and now, he said, in addition to the
waterfowl he said, the White winged dove nests in enormous colonies in the
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lower Rio Grande valley in the native brush. He said those populations have
been declining because the ranchers have been cornering off the brush and we
still have a lot of white wings down there, we don't know an awful lot about them.
The state of Texas has a White wing biologist down there by the name of Bill
Keel and we'd like you to work on white wing doves when possible and of course,
he said the variety of all sorts of other migratory game birds down there but, he
said, also you'd have the opportunity to go to Canada on assignments every
summer and boy, if I ever had any question as to what to do which job and what
my future would be or at least beginning of it, it would certainly be to take that job
in Texas. So, I took the job of US Game Management Agent. The pay, the pay
as I recall was $4250.00 a year and that compared with as best as I can
remember $2450 or 60 dollars a year for the state of Idaho but I only got paid
once a month in Idaho, got paid twice when you go to work for the Feds. So, I
just bring that out at a matter of interest because money is not what drives
people who work in the field of wildlife management, they work in it because they
have other interests, things that are real dear to their heart. But, that may be of
interest. So, we said yes, we'll take that job, after consultation with, with the
better half here and so we still had the little 20 foot trailer and we had to report to
work ourself, there's no, no moving expenses or anything like I understand is
given routinely now for people entering on work and we hauled the 20 foot trailer
down to, down to Texas and in a day or, we found a place to put it in a trailer
court and in a day or two later Ed Elmore, who is the game management agent in
Corpus Christi who I worked under came down to welcome us to Texas and I'd
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also received a note from Larry Marafcu who was the, the chief of law
enforcement out of the regional office and Larry told me that the first week of the
job down there would be spent with him on orientation. So, Larry showed up
shortly and he was staying in Brownsville and so I'd drive down to Brownsville to
their, to Larry's hotel room and listen to Larry eight hours a day for five days.
Now, if you ever met Larry Marafcu, you know what I'm talking about. But,
anyway Larry is an extremely interesting fellow, very, very capable and
knowledgeable and boy did he like to talk. So, he said, he opened the meeting
and he says, he says this week he says, I hope to tell you everything that you
need to know as a game management agent. Now, he said I want you to take,
take a pad of paper and he said I want you to record this, everything I say of
consequence and there were no air conditioning in those days and this was in
July and extremely high humidity and it was a real ordeal. That week was one of
the worst weeks I ever spent in my life and occasionally Larry would look at me
and he says, he said you didn't take a note on that. He said, let me repeat what I
just said. Well, we finally got through the week all right and he went back to
Albuquerque and so I was left to drift there as a game management agent all on
my own. Well, fortunately my office was in the San Manteo Post Office. They
had arranged for that, it was in the basement again, not air conditioned of course,
extremely humid but the great advantage here was that I'd be sharing the office,
office space with a fellow by the name of Luther C. Goldman who was refuge
manager of the Laguna Atascosa and San Ada National Wildlife refuges. Now,
Luther was the son of Major E.A. Goldman who was one of the pioneer biologists
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of the old Bureau of biological survey and also he was a nephew of Luther
Goldman, L.J. Goldman as he's called who is the first pacific flyway biologist so
here is this triumvirate of three Goldman's and I had the benefit you know, of
hearing Luther tell of the experiences of his father and his uncle in the very early
days of Bureau of biological survey and I'll never forget all of that and of course
Luther had a, had a history of his own. Wonderful fellow, one of the, one that
services the very best ornithologist and birds and Luther is right at his home town
there because of all the exotic species across the border and almost all winter
long he was just besieged with birders that wanted, wanted to come and visit his
refuges and where might they find different scarce birds, rare birds. Well, so for
summer assignments the first two years were spent in, in Western Saskatchewan
north of Swift Current. In those days the survey crews always got together in
Regina, we had a big kickoff meeting. Everyone reported there, they received
their instructions, they received their bird bands if they were on a banding
assignment, if they're on surveys they received their survey forms and
instructions and everything and the great thing was, it was just not US Fish and
Wildlife Service people, the bulk of those folks were Game management agents,
this was the workforce at the time, a few refuge people and but also the
Canadians, the wonderful group of Canadians. The Canadian wildlife service
people and a lot of provincial people and people from Ducks Unlimited.
Everyone who was doing work in Canada in spring would meet at Regina and it's
just a wonderful opportunity for a new kid on the block like me to, to learn the
people I've heard, heard so much about but it was there that I had a chance to
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meet many people which later became good friends, folks like Walt Crissy and
Johnny Lynch and Jerry Stout, Al Smith, among the Canadians Guser
Grahamkooch, Al Exuban, Bernie Gallop and among the DU people, Bill, Bill
Leach and Bob Caldwell and a number of the provincial people too. It was truly a
cooperative program.
Q What year was this?
Good point. The first year up there was 1955, on assignment. I was assigned to
a brand new study area in north of Swift current and this was an area that had
just been set up by, a brand new area that had been set up by Walt Crissy. He'd
formed the area and thought it would make a wonderful study area for two
purposes. One purpose was to use it for air to ground comparison counts. In the
air ground comparison count survey a, a designated area could be a lineal block
of habitat or whatever would be, would be flown by the air with the, with the
operational survey crew to see how many breeding ducks they would come up
with, at the same time the area would be checked on the ground by a ground
crew who would be ground truthing the area and between comparing the two of
them there would be an air to ground visibility ratio and there could be applied to
the aerial survey data in order to correct the, the aerial data because obviously a
plane zipping across the county side at a hundred and some feet above the
ground and at the speed of 70 or 80 miles an hour or whatever it might be, simply
not time to see, opportunity to see every duck and you're hoping that do see a
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representative sample of them. So, we always see far more birds on the ground
doing the ground truthing then with the aerial crews and this of course still occurs
today and ground surveys are still used today for that purpose so this is an idea
that dates back prior to my first study up there dated back certainly into the early,
early 50's for developing the air to ground comparison corrections. But the area
we worked on was called the success area and people used to joke about that,
you know success stud area, that's a little bit pompous isn't it calling it the
success study area. Well, that was easy to explain because the only town along
the transect was named success. Well, in the southeast southwestern corner,
well success was a two elevator town and that needs a little explanation I think
but in Canada at least in those days it used to be customary to, to identify the
size of the town by their number of grain elevators it had, it be two elevator towns
which really weren't much and there'd be three elevator towns which gee, now
we're beginning to talk about a you know, a, a occupied part of the country where
a four, four elevator town would have most of the things you would need on a
daily basis and, and but we went to Swift Current and Swift Current we, we
rented a house there. I was working at the time with, it doesn't come to me--
Doesn't come to me--
But, Swift Current was also a railroad center for the transcontinental railroad and
also that, that year the transcontinental highway was being built across, across
continent. Also, oil, oil fields had been found north west of town and so there
was considerable oil drilling going on too, so Swift Current was a pretty, pretty
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active town and housing was hard to find but we did, Maury Lundy and I did find
a place to stay and so we worked out north of town. We worked everyday if the
weather was good. Our purpose was to inventory breeding pairs of ducks on the
natural wetlands, the pothole country. We were in the type of pothole country
that Johnny Lynch would have called the BOP, BOP means bald open prairie.
Johnny Lynch had a great language for descriptive language for things. If I might
deviate a minute but anyway he called the prairie pothole region of the southern
three Canadian provinces and the Dakotas, he called that area the BDF, BDF
being big duck factory. North of the BDF was the BFF, that was the big fish
factory and Johnny would simplify things for convenience but what, what he is
telling us here was that the, the BDF, the big duck factory, this is where the, is
really the heart of the waterfowl production in North America. This is where the
glaciers left the potholes and marshes. It's so productive for waterfowl and
although waterfowl of course breed farther north through the forested country
and clear, clear to the artic and through Alaska and some of our birds even get
into Siberia, the Pintails breed there but winter in, in North America. But, what
Johnny was telling us here was that the, the big fish factory yes, it produces a fair
number of ducks because of it's great, great extent but gee, it was really known
for it's fish you know, so this is the big fish factory but anyway we were working in
the bald open prairie, it's total treeless except for farm shelter builts, that the
farmers put in and it was great pothole country. We had about 90 potholes per
square mile and we had about that number of breeding ducks as I remember, the
most common species was the Blue winged teal followed by the Mallard and
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Pintail were pretty close, Gadwall and the Shoveler, those were the big birds that
we worked with then. So, our purpose was to go out and inventory the ducks
along this 40 mile long route which was a quarter mile wide, the same as the
area flown by the aerial crews, inventory the number of ducks by species and
whether they're paired or single birds or whatever and do this as often as we
could and it'd take easy about three to four days to do the 42 miles and as soon
as we'd finish we'd start over again and we did this about four times during the
peak of the breeding season and during this time the aerial survey crews Walt
Crissy usually and his observer would come in and fly the area and sometimes
we'd see them and some times not but I, I mentioned that we, we did this
everyday, no Saturdays off, no Sundays off, there's no overtime, there's no comp
time, in fact that was generally true of the Fish and Wildlife Service in those days.
We worked as long as it took to get the job done. The only reprieve would be a
rainy day and it doesn't take much to put you out of commission on the prairies
when it rains, a quarter of an inch can do it because those roads get greasy slick
and most of them are gravel and un-paved, a paved route, road up there in those
days is quite unusual. So, on a rainy day that was a day that we'd stay in town
and do our laundry, we'd update our reports, correspondence, buy groceries,
things to the sort.
Q Did the air crews fly these comparison areas more then once or did they
just fly them once on an operational basis?
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That's a good question. There were a number, a number of these air ground
comparison units. There must of have been six or seven of them I guess but
they flew ours more then once. They flew it several times. I, I did see the
figures, I never saw what the, I never saw what the visibility ratios were --
(tape change)
A question had been raised here about overtime and everything I mentioned that
we never drew it or anything so let me go back if I can to the days back in the Rio
Grande Valley when I was working under Ed Elmore, US Game Management
Agent, my supervisor in Corpus Christi and of course I got instructions from Ed
and also during that week with Larry Marafca you know, to record everything I'd
done in some detail and so I did that and well, I put down the days and the times
I'd leave home to go to work, if I was leaving from home or the office or whatever
and when I'd return and it was very seldom that any of these were 8 to 5 you
know and this seemed to cause a problem and so I got Ed Elmore came down
one time soon after that and he said you know, you know, he says the hours that
you work and you report on your weekly activity reports, those are the actual
hours that you work, and I said that's right. Well, he says, you work a lot more
then 8 hours. And I said, well, it takes a lot more then 8 hours to get the job done
you know. Well, he said, he said I want you to continue to do that. He says you
are under my instructions to do that. Now, he says I've got a problem with the
regional office because the regional office would like us to show only eight hours
16
of work per day. It needant be 8 to 5 but he says, the total hours should not be
more then 8 hours and Ed says I've always disregarded that myself and he says
and I, I always show actual hours working and he says, I'm your supervisor and
he says, those are the instructions I have for you and so I continued to do that
and finally Ed took me aside one time, and he said you know why, why I'm doing
what I'm doing with, regarding my hours of work each day and I said I have no
idea. Well, he says first off, he says you're automatically violating a, a Federal
law by, by changing reporting hours that you are not working. He says, he says,
you, you're required to show the hours, the actual hours that you do and he says
that's what I do and he says what you're doing. He says no problem. But he
says for some reason he thinks that the, the regional office seems to think that in
time this might build a record for somebody to come back in and ask for
additional pay and he, Ed said that's exactly what I intend to do after I retire. He
says, I'm going to put a claim in for all the additional hours I worked and he says,
it will be the test case and he said it will be very, very important and to make a
long story short, Ed eventually did retire, he did file claim against the government
for reimbursement of the additional hours that he worked. Well, the statute of
limitations entered into the thing of course that it was only the last two or years or
whatever it was that he was working that, that was subject to claim and that got
to be a huge controversy and to make a long story short, Ed got a court decision
in his favor for reimbursement of the hours he worked. I had no idea you know, if
it's full compensation, what the rate was or anything at all like that and at his
instructions I had been accumulating the same hours and everything and I, I
17
decided never to file. I never filed for mine but that did set in motion then some
recognition that the people that were working additional hours and to if they were
to perform the jobs that they were being asked to do needed, it should be justly
compensated and that, I believe is how overtime first began in the Fish and
Wildlife Service and haven't followed it since, I have no idea what the situation is
now.
Q Continue now, you're on the breeding grounds there in Saskatchewan and
running those --
Okay, yeah back to, back to the Success study area and after we'd finish up the,
finish up the breeding pair surveys in May, May to about mid June, I was
returned to Texas, drive back down to Texas for about a week at home, turn
around and come back north to begin the work on the production surveys on the
Success study area and so I said gee, I, I really don't have an awful lot I can get
accomplished in Texas, there's an enormous amount of, of travel time and
expense and gasoline and so forth involved and I said would there be any
problem if I stayed up here? And they said well, if you do you gotta stay, you
gotta take annual leave you know, we can't give you any other dispensation to do
that so, anyway, I took annual leave up, stayed up there and my wife Marilyn
came up and oh, we took off to Prince Albert National Park I think, and we had a
wonderful camping and fishing trip up there so, back to the production survey.
Well, we surveyed exactly the same wetlands following the same procedures and
18
everything except this time the purpose was to monitor what happened as a
result of the, of the breeding of the pairs that we'd inventoried in May and June.
We were counting broods and also broody like hens because lots of times you
may not see the brood but you can tell by the behavior of then hen as to whether
she has a brood in the nearby vegetation and this is a case where we were not
really ground truthing because there is no way that we could find every single
brood produced on that study area so almost all breeding ground surveys that
relate to waterfowl production had that same problem. It's enormous obstacles
that I'm not sure anybody's overcome yet. So, then usually about, after or during,
following these surveys we'd stay in Canada and band ducks and then return
back to our stations so this is just one perspective of what some of the summer
work was but other people were totally engaged at waterfowl surveys, other
people were full time banding, doing other things.
Q And what was happening with that information at that time? As far as the
process, of setting the regulations and what was the procedure back then?
All the information went back to Patuxant into a, most of the field people I think
will send it into some big black box back there because they were really not
involved in the, in the processing of the data and there is a great deal of work
that had to be done with, with the survey information that came in from the field
and this rested chiefly in the hands of Walt Crissy. Walt at that time was the
Chief Waterfowl Population person I'd guess you'd call him. He was in the
19
division wildlife research at that time. And it was his job to put together all the
information, the breeding ground survey information, the production information,
adjusting the breeding survey information for visibility factors, things like that,
bringing information together in a comprehensive manner and then extrapolating
or projecting it to what we knew of the area that the surveys represented, the
universe represented by the survey and all that work was done back in Patuxent
with, with the staff and eventually the end product would be a waterfowl status
report. It'd be an evaluation of the number, of the breeding pairs of waterfowl
and, and an index as to what the population was at the, at the conclusion of the
production season. I, I hate to use the numbers of waterfowl because everything
almost we do is really based on indices, which fall short of what the actually
numbers of birds are. Then Walt was involved in carrying, carrying that
information from the surveys and everything and reporting this to the Federal
folks who are involved in establishing waterfowl frameworks and by frameworks I
mean the out of seasons, the number of hunting days allowed, the number of
ducks permitted per day, things of that sort and Walt did a fantastic job I think in
pulling that information together, not that everybody agreed with him. In fact,
there was a great deal of dissention and disagreement every year because
people were seeing parts of the waterfowl breeding grounds that were in superb
shape, they looked wonderful other parts were probably just as bad the other
way and the same with the public, the public would see bits and fragments of, of
wetlands habitat and wintering populations and what they don't appreciate is that
what they are looking at is not representive of typical of, of the whole universe
20
and when we're dealing with the continental population like waterfowl that has to
be our basis as to what the total population is doing. We're of course, interested
in what segments of it are doing to because they have their own flyways and
wintering areas.
Q What amazes me is that this is the time before computers. I mean you are
having all this data that you are have to in effect write down by hand and adding
machines and how long a process was that. I mean were they doing it in good
time?
Well, they were doing it with the, with the old Monroe calculators, I'm answer the
question about how the data was processed and in the days I've speaking of now
we didn't, the Patuxent Wildlife Research center where Walt was located after he
moved from the Washington office out there. There were no computers out there
and, and the place was jammed full of the old Monroe calculators. I don’t know if
you know what I'm talking about but you'd punch this data in by hand and they
were electrical and you'd crank them and they'd go (cranking noises) and they'd,
it goes to a, goes to a single calculation it might take half a minute I guess, or
something like that but very, very crude. Of course, no hand held calculators
either. Well, I, I talked about Crissy but I should say, Walt wasn't the first one to
put together information of that sort because surveys have been carried on for a
long time up in the Canadian Prairies back in the '30's. biologists went up there
for the bureau biological survey and did roadside surveys but nobody really knew
21
what they meant in terms of reflecting what was really going on up there and
Fred Lincoln was probably the key individual back in those days but it was his
responsibility to pull together all that information for setting regulations and so
Fred Lincoln in my view, I think it did a great deal with the research he had
available but he lacked the, a lot of the tools and, and manpower and everything
that we had later on.
Q What drove people like that? Like Fred Lincoln and these other guys, I
mean was it I mean, just scientific curiosity or was it concern that wrong
information would over harvest the species? Was it the threat of lawsuits? Was
it just that it has always been done? I mean I'm curious to how that leap was
made to start looking at the continental waterfowl resource as, in a
comprehensive year to year way?
I think there's probably two answers to that. One, is that every single one of
these people that I'm talking about have an innate interest and concern about
whatever resource they're working with whether it's waterfowl or morning does or
whatever. They just have this driven, drive interest in a, in a species and
secondly, secondly everyone of them as a character of curiosity or innovation.
They want to learn about the unknown and so I say, it's dedication first and it's
this deep curiosity second that drove most of these early pioneers of waterfowl
management and research in North America.
22
Q It wasn't like a Bureaucratic mandate to come up with these numbers, I
mean it sort of, they started coming up and people began I guess to see the
advantages to knowing this in terms of better managing the resource.
Yeah, I think I can answer that best but George B. Saunders was one of these
early people and he was the first Pacific, first flyway biologist in the central flyway
and was sent into Canada in the early '30's during '34 and 5 during the dust bowl
days and his instructions and they're instructions that other people like him
receive read something like this that there is a problem with ducks, we have duck
populations seem to be going down. We know ducks come out of the Dakotas
and Canada, go up there and find out what the problem is. It's that simple and
they were on their own at that point and they did the best they could with the
resources they had to try to best answer that question.
Q Art Hawkins talks about when he was setting up the you know, the system
of transects in Manitoba and how muddy the roads were and it must have been
you know, really, I mean just the dedication of those people is what really
amazes me because you're doing something that nobody can really check on
you, you know and you can come back with any kind of a report, nobody's going
to, going to doubt but there was a vision back then that, that really has been --
(Side B)
23
But they did have few advantages for example we didn't have safety meetings in
those days, safety reports, well, I guess we had to fill out a safety report maybe
once in a while but by in large we were pretty much free of bureaucratic
paperwork which I think there's a great deal of nowadays from what I can
determine. We run a different way in a given period of time we spent, able to
spend a much, much higher portion of our time in, in what we thought were the
important things to do.
Q Talk more about some of those early people like Lincoln and Saunders
and the Goldman's and those people that, that really made a difference. Explain
a little bit what the atmosphere was that nurtured those people.
Well, of course I didn't know a lot of these people and, and the few of them I did
know is some cases I knew them for a year or perhaps a day. Let me, let me go
back to George Saunders if I might but I was a game management in south
Texas and, and I was in the office one day and this gentleman walked in and he
knew Luther Goldman the refuge manager and they evidently were real close
friends of course Luther introduced me and he said this is, this is George
Saunders. You know, George has spent a lot of time in the Rio Grande Valley in
Mexico on waterfowl and also white winged doves and everything and he said,
he's just going through down here some of his records are kept out here at the
refuge headquarters and so I got talking to George Saunders and I'd heard of
him you know, he's a legend. But I, I, he was truly representive of this early
24
group of biologists. I mean he traveled all through Mexico for years under the
most imaginable difficult circumstances and everything to try to inventory
waterfowl and evaluate Mexican wetlands and of course this has all be published
now but gosh, in a minutes Dr. Saunders said to me, to me he was Dr. Saunders,
he said what are you doing tomorrow? And I said oh, I'm going out in the field
and he says, he says, why don't we go out and spend a day together? Well, if I
had anything planned the next day I readily forgot about it because I could think
of nothing I'd rather do then spend a day with George Saunders and so I did that.
I was one of the most fascinating days that I can think of and that is the only day I
ever spent with George Saunders. I never saw him after that day and just
recently because George Saunders died in February at the age of 93 I was
asked to write his obituary for the York and I just completed that. So I hope that
George Saunders and some of the things he did will be remembered perpetually.
Clarence Caughtum is, is someone you read about a great deal too and of
course he came out of Utah and he was chief of Welark research for Bureau of
biological survey and, and also into the Fish and Wildlife Service days but
Caughtum was a, was a remarkable person. He knew everything about
anything, about migratory birds and he had an enormous memory. I don't think
he ever forgot anything but he came down to the Rio Grande Valley one day and,
and he asked (inaudible) I guess he'd been referred to me because I was the
local game management agent you know, and he said, I would like to look at
some white wing dove nesting colonies and the season was, that was the proper
time of the season and everything and I, he was in the Washington office at the
25
time and I, I was just delighted you know, to be able to spend some time with him
and I said well, I'd only been in the Rio Grande Valley a short while then and I
didn't know the locations well of the nesting colonies but I knew some state, state
officers that did and I said well, Dr. Caughtum would it be okay if we could have
one of the Texas game wardens come with us tomorrow and well, he said, that'd
be wonderful. He said, I'd I'd (inaudible) enjoy the day with him and so we met
the night before in his motel and we talked about where we were going to go and
everything and so we got down to the time well, who's car are we going to take
and what time should we pick you up, Dr. Caughtum and so forth and he said
well, I understand that the white winged doves in their breeding colonies begin to
perform about, about 4:30 in the morning and it's getting a little light at that time
(inaudible) so they are going on to their breeding behavior and everything and so
he said why don't you pick me up at the hotel about 4:00 in the morning tomorrow
morning. I was watching these two Texas Fish and Game officers and they were
just absolutely devastated, devastated to begin a day at this, uncivilized hour of
4:00 in the morning. Well, if you know the folks in Texas you can't begin a day
without two scalding hot cups of coffee to begin with and you just don't gulp two
hot cups of coffee, you, you have to exchange the pleasantries of the day and
everything and breakfast with Texas folks is a leisurely exercise but anyway we
did meet Dr. Caughtum at 4:00 in the morning and I think he was satisfied and
seen what there was to see at the breeding colonies. Of course Caughtum went
on to be co-editor of the book on the white winged dove.
26
Q Well, continue your career from the work in Saskatchewan and being in
Texas and --
Well, okay for two, so for two years in 1955 and '56 I worked on the study area
there at Swift Current, okay, well, things happen on the prairies as they always
do, prairies got dry, the potholes didn't have water in the, in the spring of '57, now
that country only gets around 12 inches of precipitation a year. It is dry county
and only under the best of circumstances do the potholes really fill up so that
happened to be the situation in '57 so Crissy made the decision not to continue
the success study area but we still had the big survey banding program
underway, cooperative banding program and by cooperative I mean it was Fish
and Wildlife Service and it was volunteers or people assigned from various Fish
and Game departments, if Duck Unlimited had someone available or the
provincial people. So, the crews which were 5 to 6 people represented a broad
array of backgrounds and everything so anyway I was asked to lead the crew in
1957 through western Saskatchewan and the country was laid out in degree
blocks of latitude and longitude and our object was to band a hundred flightless
Mallards in each of these degree blocks and that's not so easily done as might
sound even though you are in the heart of the duck country because
circumstances have, have to be just right in order to catch any number of
Mallards, particularly flightless Mallards so the crew I had as I recall was a
Canadian wildlife service fellow by the name of John, I'll come up with it in a
minute, a fellow from Louisiana by the name of Mort Smith and Mort eventually
27
ended up with the Fish and Wildlife Service as head of the aerial survey crews,
same job that Jim Vozer now has and Al Cannon from the state of Ohio and
Dave Harper from Illinois, out of the Canadian wildlife service fellow was John
Hancock. And so we met Regina as usual, got our, we got our banding
equipment and everything and took off for western Saskatchewan to begin the
banding program. We had two vehicles and those were very interesting days.
We worked the same schedules everyday of the week that wasn't raining and we
were prepared to camp out if necessary but ordinarily we'd end up in a two
elevator, no, not a two elevator because that would a two elevator town ordinarily
wouldn't have a hotel but maybe a three elevator town or a four elevator town if
we were lucky and almost every town had a Chinese restaurant of course in
those days even, even Success had a Chinese restaurant , a two elevator town
had a Chinese restaurant and the food is pretty good but whatever, so, so we
worked these long hours in, in banding and trapping and the work itself was
challenging because you'd try to find a pothole that had, well you could see a
number of broods on it and hopefully Mallards and then try to figure out how to
out smart the Mallards. If you give them half a chance they'd run up the far side
and out in the prairie and be off in the pothole to the, over the hill in a, in a few
seconds. They're not adverse at all to departing the pothole, other species not
so much so.
Q So, you were dry trapping these birds as apposed to bait trapping?
28
That's right. We were dry trapping. We had equipment that we could put up very
easily and so in addition to looking for a pothole that had a trappable number of
bird, we were also looking for a pothole that had a configuration that would permit
us to set up a trap in a strategic manner that we could catch some proportion of
those bird or for example a plot of land that would go out which if you got up on
one end of the pothole and you drove the, drove the birds or scared them down
to the other end then you'd walk around and come back and drive them hopefully
into the trap you'd set in the right place. Well, it doesn't work quite like that but
quite often you would catch large numbers of birds but other times it be score,
ducks would have score ten and our crew would have zero. Don't ever
underestimate the, the wisdom of a Mallard. So, then of course bundle the
equipment up, put it back in the car and take off and hopefully, hopefully spot
another pothole. Well, we, we had some real disadvantages. I mean it just,
simply getting to areas was difficult because roads were few and far between
probably the main disadvantage was that we didn't have very good map
coverage, certainly no aerial photographs and occasionally someone in town
we'd be talking to them and they'd say oh, there's a lot of ducks out on such and
so or we'd find out how to get there. Occasionally the aerial survey crews would
drop us a note maybe or, or call us and, and tell us where there's some
prospects for catching birds. But, there's some funny, funny experiences that
come up trapping birds, up there because the population's low you never knew
who owned what piece of ground a lot of it was Crown land, it wasn't always
marked that way the private land, you didn't know who owned it or anything and
29
normally we, we would just go in and set up a trap and everything and I
remember one morning it was about 10 in the morning and we set up a dry trap
on a pothole, on the land, we didn't know who owned it or anything and we had
the ducks almost ready to go into the trap and we closed the gate of course,
always careful to do that if there's livestock around and gosh here came a,
comes a fellow in a car, a truck and he drives through the gate and storms over
there and I was able to wave him back because I was afraid he was going to
disturb the birds and they might not go into their trap. So, he understood that
much so he didn't interfere until we got the traps closed and then he got out and
he staggered, staggered over to me and he said gee are you, you folks, you folks
know whose land, whose land this is? And he was drunker then a skunk and I
said no, I said no I don't know who owns this property. And he says, well he
says, he says, it's my property, he says you don’t have permission to be out here
on my property. And I said yes we do, we have permission. And he straightened
up and he said who gave you permission to be on the property here? And I said
the Queen and he says, I can show you that and I pulled out my banding permit,
which I carried with me personally. It was a Canadian banding permit and the
letterhead of course in those days you know, it had the Queen's not logo but
whatever you'd call it in the letterhead you know, it was a very official looking
document you know and I said here, here's the permission from the Queen and
he looks at it and he shook his head and he says, okay went back got in the car
and drove away. But, but one more incident about the banding crews maybe but
we'd stay in these hopefully we'd tried to find a little town that had a, had a hotel
30
in it. Well, the hotels were generally pretty old and sort of run down and we'd
also hoped to find one that had, had a shower in it or a bathtub and hopefully,
having found that hopefully they had hot water. Well, you take, you take a
banding crew five guys that have been out there sweating and everyone badly in
need of a shower or a bath or something obviously you run out of water. So, I
mentioned Dave Harper from Illinois and Dave was the youngest of the crew so I
guess that's why he bore the brunt of everything. But to begin with he used to
ride with me and I'd, I'd put a, although I had a radio in the government car it was
not, it was for official channels in Texas and so I couldn't pick up a --
(Tape change)
Yeah we are getting ready to take a bath and a shower knowing we are going to
run out of hot water and such, oh no, wait we're back to Dave Harper because he
is the, we'll get back to Dave in a minute. Anyway Dave would ride with me and I
had another commercial radio, I could pick up a commercial radio station and
invariably Dave would turn over, he'd crank up the, crank up the radio and he
was real fan of a guy named Elvis Presley who I didn't know, I didn't know who
he was until he died you know but Elvis was just coming into his own then and
Dave was really into Elvis Presley music and he'd turn the thing up full
(inaudible) you know and so anyway there after I said, I'd always say to Dave
now, why, Dave why don't you ride in the other car here so we'd circulate around
you know and have different people so we'd all get to know each other real good
31
and boy we did get to know everyone real good at the end of the summer but
anyway I took car of the Elvis Presley problem that way. I always happened to
have some other person riding with me. Well, back to the, back to needing a
bath and a shower so we always knew we were going to run out of hot water so
one of the fellows suggested, well, because Dave would, Dave would always
beat us in there. He was really, he was real savvy that way you know, he'd go in
and usually get the first shower and so somebody didn't think that was very
democratic and so they set up a system of drawing short straws for, for the
shower. Hopefully you'd get one shower, I mean one guy would get a shower
maybe a second would but not all five or six and so anyway one of the crew
members was handling the straws that we'd draw every time and it was the
oddest thing because Dave would always draw the short straw, you know. Dave
was always the last man for the shower and he never figured that out, never
figured it out. Anyway at the end of about a month of banding waterfowl up
there you know, you got to know your crew members really well and they're some
wonderful people. We were all different of course and we had our own problems,
and we had our own attributes and everything but, but we were, there was a real
sense of camaraderie that developed and I think most of us kept in touch with
each other in the years ahead. I know I did with most of my crew members and I
bumped into them in many places there after.
32
Q Did you get any indication of band return? Were you part of that process
like they are now? How successful was the banding thing and was it sort of
reconfirming the flyways?
Yeah. Well, each, the leader of each banding crew held, held the master permit
and we'd take turns doing different things like recording data and things like that
and occasionally right at the end you know, I'd even say to one of the fellows I
said well, I think I know where I'd put a trap on this, on this pothole but where
would you put it? And occasionally we'd try it their way you know. But whatever,
but because I held the master, the banding permit then I got the returns, or the
reports of the, of the birds taken that year and the following years as long there's
a bandable population still surviving so I, that really fascinated me but (inaudible)
Pintails for example, ended up in the, in California, Grizzly Island, Sassoon
marsh, the central valley of California. I know I got a report one time of, of a
Pintail that had been shot by a fellow by the name of Lawrence Melkier, he
doesn't' t mean anything to you probably, most of you. But Lawrence Melkier
was a very famous opera tenor and evidently he's been shooting there and I sort
of regretted you know, I had his address I sort of regretted that I didn't write back
to him and try to determine what the circumstances were, whatever.
Q Were you getting compliance with returns? What percent?
33
Compliance, you mean out of the birds shot how many were actually reported by
hunters? I should say that of course most of our banded recoveries were from
hunters because that was the chief source of mortality and of course that's
always been a big question in wildlife management over the years as to what
proportion of the bird bands that people encounter maybe not necessarily shot
them but find dead birds, whatever actually end up being reported to the bird
banding laboratory and so there has been a number of band reporting studies
done and the studies at least those I'm familiar with suggested perhaps a, a third
of the banded, band recoveries were being reported at least in those days. Well,
I, the Service has changed it's policies and procedures because in those days we
didn't try unduly influence the reporting of bird bands because we didn't know
how we could do it in a universal manner throughout all the hunters in north
America for example and we could mount a publicity program in one place but
not in another and then that would skew the data so that was the reason in those
days that we didn't do that but since then there has been a change in philosophy
and there's been efforts to promote the reporting of bird bands more uniformly
and so we have some better fixes I think through placing reward bands on birds.
In other words, if a person sends in a band that has a reward on it, they may get
a monetary amount in return for it or some other kind of a prize or a gift.
Q Well, back to the, back to your career. Texas, up there in Saskatchewan
banding.
34
Okay, well, wind down the work the Game management agents have done but
when I tool the job I, I sort of thought that I'd probably not spend the whole full
career in game management not that it wasn't interesting but I was interested in
other aspects of, of waterfowl management research and in fact when I, even
before I took the job Floyd Thompson told me, he says, you know, you know, he
says what you need to do is to get your first job in an outfit and get some
experience and things and then he says, opportunities will come up in other
areas if you happened to be interested in those other areas and so I sort of
followed Floyd on that and that's the way it evolved and so anyway I was, I'd
always been interested in the prairie pothole county and I'd seen a lot of it of
course through the three summer assignments in Canada but my first
recollection of the prairie pothole country goes back to World War II days
because I was in the Navy, I'd just finished up the great lakes and I asked to be
detailed to Bermet in Washington to an aircraft carrier. I was on board a troop
train, it was in late July 1945 and we took across, took off across on the troop
train I think it was the northern Pacific and we went right through the heart of the
prairie pothole country through north Dakota and I'd read about the prairie
pothole country and everything but I'd never seen it and evidently 1945 was a
wonderful waterfowl year because I can just remember the potholes were still
brimmed full in mid summer and absolutely loaded with ducks, absolutely loaded.
Unfortunately, we don't have any survey data to verify the impression I have of,
of, of that situation but that was my first experience with the prairie pothole
country. Well, anyway I, I learned that, while I was still a game management
35
agent in Texas that a brand new program was opening up in the Dakotas and the
program related to the preservation of wetland or pothole habitat in, in the
Dakotas and Minnesota in the US portion of the prairie pothole country and a
friend that I'd gone to school with dropped me a note and he said you know,
we've got a vacancy up here and he said maybe you'd like to apply for it and I got
more information about it and I thought gee, that'd really be great, not that the
experiences in Texas weren't great, I had some wonderful, wonderful times and
days in Texas and everything but honest to God that heat and humidity down
there and the no seeums and so forth I thought we were probably due for a
change, my wife agreed with that, she'd been teaching school and everything
and we thought probably we'd spent enough time in Texas so I applied for the job
and I got it and it was stationed in Aberdeen, South Dakota and it was in what
was called then the WHP project, this is wetland habitat preservation project, it
was a new program that the service was just mounting and the reason for this
was that at the same time one part of the government, the US Fish and Wildlife
Service was interested in preserving waterfowl habitat on the breeding range
another part of the government in the department of agriculture and in the ASC
agricultural stabilization and conservation service in particular and the soil
conservation service were engaged in a program that was headed exactly the
opposite way to, to destroy wetland habitat. Well, this program had originated
back in World War II as a means of increasing food production, the rational I
guess being that by, by draining potholes and potholes have very rich soils that
additional grain or other crops could be produced for the war effort and so the
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government was subsidizing farmers to drain potholes. There were two parts,
two so called conservation practices and one was called C-9, the C-9 which
opened drainage in this case the farmer was partially reimbursed for --
So, the farmers were reimbursed to, to drain their potholes under the C-9
practice and C-10 related to drainage, draining potholes by the use of tiles. Tile
was required for draining wetland in where the, where the rainfall precipitation
seems to be higher, up in the prairie Johnny Lynch's bald open prairie of C-9
ditches did the same job cheaper. So, here we have these two, two parts of
government operating at just opposite means. Well, this first came to light in I
believe it was 1949 when Cory Shoenfeld wrote an article for Field and Stream, it
was called "Goodbye Potholes" and Cory who was a journalism student at the
University of Wisconsin, I never had the privilege of meeting him but he did this
wonderful, wonderful article, came out in the field, he talked to, he talked to
waterfowl biologist in the Fish and Wildlife Service, he talked to state biologists,
he talked to the people in the department of Agriculture who were involved in the
program and everything and he did a wonderful piece of investigative reporting
and "Goodbye Potholes" is truly one of the most remarkable and important
pieces of popular literature in the whole era of waterfowl management and
research and I sometimes wonder how many waterfowl biologists have ever
read, particularly waterfowl biologist today have ever read "Goodbye Potholes".
So, in order to someway evaluate, better evaluate what is being done by the
Department of Agriculture and to find means of offsetting it the Fish and Wildlife
37
Service set up the WHP project in region three out of Minneapolis and the
program was under the division of river basin studies, they didn't know where
else to put it that seemed to be the most likely outfit because it was an outfit that
dealed with other Federal agencies particularly the Bureau of Reclamation and
so when I arrived on the scene the program was being administered by Warren
Nord in the regional office, he as head of river basin studies but under him was a
fellow by the name of Burt Rouse and his deputy was Ray St Orrs I worked
directly with, with Burt and Ray for seven years out of Aberdeen. Our field
stations were called area, later became known as area acquisition offices and
they were located in Devil's lake in North Dakota, Jamestown and Mynot in South
Dakota we eventually had another office in, in Hyrum and in Minnesota the
offices were in Fergus Falls and Benson. Grady Mann was in Fergus Falls and
Clyde Oden in Jamestown and Blue Madden in Devil's Lake and George Jonco
in Hyrum and those are the names that come to mind. So we were, we were
essentially given a free hand. We were not told, you know how to do this job.
We were expected to exercise whatever ingenuity we, we could to evaluate the
situation and try to figure out some solutions to it. So in the beginning we would
testify a great deal before different agricultural meetings where the various
agricultural programs were being discussed. We'd point out that there is another
side to this. You know, we're very concerned about the loss of wetlands and so
forth and I think we made some headway there. We did a lot of publicity work,
wrote a lot of articles, attended a lot of meetings promoting the value of wetlands
and although waterfowl was the primary resource we were concerned about we,
38
we recognized and tried to lead other people to understand that wetlands had far
other values too then waterfowl produced habitat for many other wildlife
creatures and we thought they served some hydrological purpose in retaining
water, not, not getting water off the land as fast as possible into the lower rivers
such as the Red river of the north and Dakota and seems to have a flooding
problem about every other year now and many of the rivers in Minnesota and in
the upper Mississippi river generally to my mind I think a lot of this flooding could
have been alleviated to a degree by retaining that water in a natural wetlands
rather then having to drain it out. So the work in Aberdeen was fascinating we,
the program shifted focus over the years to the point where we were able to offer
something affirmative, positive to farmers in a way of actually purchasing or
providing them with easements, easement payments if they would retain the
wetlands in their present condition. So, if you travel through the Dakotas
nowadays you'll see many. Many WPA signs, Wetland Prod, Wetland
Preservation areas, Fish and Wildlife Service signs and these are areas that
were evaluated and recommended for purchase by the Federal government and I
did a great deal of that work in North, northeastern South Dakota. George Juncle
did much of it in South, southeastern South Dakota and some of the people I
named did it in North Dakota and in Minnesota. So, we had an incentive to for
the farmers to consider some other use of the wetlands then, then draining them
for crops and perhaps even more important then that I think was just raising the,
the elevation of knowledge of the value of wetlands to the general public. At one
time, well back in those days people had little appreciation of, of a wetland it was,
39
it was a place where you had to drive your tractor around and hopefully nit stick
your tractor in it and I think was a, a pretty fair understanding nowadays
nationwide that wetlands are indeed some of our most productive types of habitat
and most threatened. So, we spent, Marilyn and I spent seven years in
Aberdeen on the wetlands program and raised a family in, part of a family in the
process there and the Aberdeen days were great days. We had some wonderful
times there. I was very fortunate to share an office in Aberdeen with Jerry Stout,
one of the old original flyway biologists and one of the most memorable people I
can ever imagine meeting and there's only one Jerry Stout and we visited a great
deal and I learned a great deal about wetlands in the Dakotas and also from
Jerry's work in Canada. Ray Merty was also in the office for a while and he
worked out of Northern Prairie Wildlife research center once it got set up. Well,
enjoyed the days in Aberdeen a great deal and the habitat work a great deal but
an opportunity came back to go back to Patuxent to work with Walt Crissy and
his brand new deputy a fellow by the name of Dr. Al Guise. Al Guise was the
statistician and one of the most, together they were among the most remarkable
people I've ever met in my life and so, Al Guise came out to visit us in
Minneapolis. Let me back up I missed a step. But going from Aberdeen had an
opportunity to go into Minneapolis to the regional office back in the outfit I left in
Texas and they had a job there that was called assistant regional supervisor
technical and this is chiefly a biological job in a law enforcement outfit which
sounds a little strange but law enforcement officers and game management
agents are still being used for banding and surveys and everything up to that
40
time so there was a legitimate need there they participated in winter surveys and
went to Canada and everything so it made sense in that respect and Art Hawkins
at one time held that position and Art Hawkins was still in the Minneapolis office
as Mississippi flyway biologist and so I viewed that as an opportunity to spend
some time with Art and work with him and so that was also an incentive so I, so
we moved to Minneapolis and ended up three years there and it was an
extremely busy time I learned very little about Minneapolis or St. Paul because I
was never there, I was always out in the field somewhere on some kind of a
problem or survey or something. Those were exciting days in the Fish and
Wildlife Service because new programs were being set up, the Morning dove
surveys for example were being set up nationally in a new randomized manner
and so I worked with that and the people beginning to get concerned about other
species and waterfowl beside the morning dove, a wood cock for example.
Some friends of Bob Burwell's the regional director then in Minneapolis. He
called me into his office one day and he says, you know, I've got some friends
and he says you know, they're, they're real avid wood cock hunters and they're
concerned that we don't know much about wood cock and he says they tell me
that we aught to have some kind of a workshop or something and pull together
the few people in the United States that understand or know anything about
woodcock and I wonder if you would do that, would you, would you represent me
and work with the state of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota and help
organize this woodcock gathering or something and I said sure, I'd be delighted
to do that and so I got to meet a lot of people then, interesting people work with
41
wood cock and we had the first meeting at Long lake in Minnesota and every two
to three years now there are still these woodcock workshops and they've gotten
to be big, big affairs and they put out their own publication and everything and I
think maybe we have some, we have some rough notes we may have Xeroxed
or mimeographed back about the first one but, but that was the beginning of it.
Well, anyway well, at in Minneapolis and working with surveys and everything I of
course had contact with the people back in Patuxent with Walt Crissy and Al
Guise and everything and so one day Al Guise came out and was visiting and he
said, he said why don't you come back to Patuxent we'd like to have you come
back there. He said we've got a lot of exciting things going on, going on back in
Patuxent and there's some new programs that are getting underway. We have a
position we've got we need to fill and so we talked about it, Marilyn and I and
decided well, yeah perhaps and, and talked to other people and people said well,
in your career you've got to spend a couple of years back in Washington you
know for career development if nothing else but you know, spend your time back
there a couple of years and then he says you go back in the field and everything.
Well, it really doesn't work that way. So, I said well, well, Patuxent's not
Washington DC, oh, that's alright experience is all the same. They count
Patuxent is the same as experiencing Washington, DC, see? But --
Okay, we're back to Minneapolis again and the busy life there but one of the, one
of the key problems during the three years in Minneapolis was Canada geese
and particularly the Canada geese in the Mississippi valley population. These
42
are geese that breed up on the western side of Hudson Bay and they, they
migrate down through Wisconsin and winter in Illinois, southern part of Illinois,
crab orchard and Horseshoe lake area but this is a population it's been studied
over the years on this, it's a population that attracts an awful lot of hunting
pressure and wildlife populations tend to react to changes in the environment and
as did the Canada Geese in the Horacan, around the refuge there that farmers
planted more and more corn and geese learned how to capitalize on the corn to
the extent of actually pulling it off, off the stocks. So, geese lingered in
Wisconsin longer and longer periods of time and arrived in Illinois later and later
and of course with more geese around for longer periods of time in Wisconsin the
harvest of those geese kept mounting to the concern of, of, of Illinois and each of
the states had a theoretical goose harvest quota that Wisconsin was only to
have, have so many geese shot and as in Illinois and that this would be in line
with population objections and no harvested, over harvest would occur. Well,
over harvest occurred everywhere because there is no real mechanism for
determining how many geese were being actually taken by the hunters so one of
the jobs I had in Minneapolis was to set up some set of sort of an effective quota
system and after many, many years of state efforts to try to give some meaning
to the state quotas the decision was finally made for the Federal government to
administer the goose harvest system in Wisconsin. We would, we would permit
the, determine the number of permits and set up the mechanism and everything
for the distribution of permits in cooperation with the Wisconsin Department of
Fish and Game and this was done on a computer basis so it was really my first
43
experience in working with computers and, which was an eye opener and it was
one of the earliest applications I believe to the use of computers in regulating
harvest of waterfowl. Well, it wasn't a hundred percent ses, successful but it did,
it did give a better control of, of insurance on the quotas then we'd had before but
in the mean time with more and more geese at Horack and this cause more local
problems, more concerned on the part of Illinois and other states that harvested
these geese and everyone agreed that there is simply too many geese in
Horacan and how to, how to lessen the number of geese and get them moving
on their way down south and so I looked into other mechanisms in cooperation
with other people as to how we could better disburse and reduce the number of
geese and, and some places harassment or driving geese, physically driving
them would lesson the attractiveness and that they'd eventually move onto other
places so the Service made a, I say very reluctantly a decision to harass the
geese at Horacan and so the Service mounted an all out program there by
bringing in pilots, refuge pilots, flyway biologist pilots and gathering together
propane cannons and other things that are used for harassing geese and well,
we did cause quite a stir there I can assure you. A lot of geese got up in the air,
a lot of them came back where they were, the program ran over probably over
ten days the best I can recall. In the process of course, a lot of the Wisconsin
goose hunters got concerned about this, driving geese away would lessen their
opportunities to hunt geese not that they didn't have a lot of opportunity or more
then their opportunity anyway, became a great big political hot potato and it was
culminated then in the state of Wisconsin driving out, the Attorney General,
44
assistant Attorney General and several of his aids and other very, very important
folks in Madison we were told came out in a caravan, served papers on the Fish
and Wildlife Service people involved in the harassment program including myself
and we were hauled down to Beaver Dam and made an appearance before a
state judge down there. We were charged with harassing geese without the
consent of the state of Wisconsin and of course Federal laws always take
precedent, rules and regulations always take precedent over state regulations
and everything so we, we recognize that nothing really was going to happen out
of all this and it was a chiefly a publicity measure probably one that the state if
they really new the details would be reluctant to participate in but anyway the
harassment program ran on and I, I was responsible for writing an evaluation and
report of the thing and I, I do not think it was very successful I think there were
probably other mechanisms that could have been taken for it but at least we
tried, tried something that hadn't been proven before, probably habitat lessening
the attractiveness of the Horacon area from an agricultural standpoint would
have been a far more important --
(Next tape)
Q You were writing a report about harassment and –
Yeah, and but, but you look at it from a practical standpoint you know, you tell
farmers you’re planting too much corn out here, you aught to cut back you corn
45
acreage in, you know half. You know, that’s sort of, sort of a foulesy you see, we
wildlife's drift into all the time. We look at a wildlife problem and we come up with
a solution to it from the view point of wildlife and really there’s not much
consideration about all the other factors that relate to this ever becoming a
practicality. I don’t know how many times I’ve read research, you read research
reports on and they propose something for the benefit for whatever the particular
wildlife problem is and, and the thing is totally, totally unrealistic, it’s dreaming on
cloud nine but anyway back to the point. So, anyway the harassment program at
Horkan and did draw a lot of attention, the everyone recognized that there was
indeed a problem there and the states participated there after a lot better and
enforcement other quotes. The overall end of it I think was positive in terms of
benefit to the, to the resource. If you remember, now we’re talking about 1966 I
guess it was you know, we were in the Vietnam, Vietnam war then –
Q ’64.
’64, okay, had begun at ’64. No, I was in Horkan, we were in Minneapolis ’65
though ’67. Well, whatever it was. We were in war with, in Vietnam and the
Milwaukee journal always had a great cartoon and I remember the one that
shows, it shows LBJ at his desk and he has Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamara before him and on LBJ’s desk is a globe of the world and it’s turned
around so that the United States is on view and right were Wisconsin would be
there is a little puff of smoke going up and LBJ is looking at Bob McNamara and
46
he says, Bob how many troops can we sent to Horkan. I’ve got that in here
somewhere. Well to close out the Horkan matter, about 5 months after all the
harassment had ceased and every thing we got papers from the state of
Wisconsin which officially, officially withdrew the charges against us for harassing
geese in Wisconsin without state permit.
Q And then you went on to Patuxent?
Yeah, okay Patuxent. So, we’re still in Minneapolis and Al Guise came out as a
recruiting trip I guess because he wanted us to go back to the Patuxent and work
with these new programs and everything. One of the new programs was called
the accelerated research program and this was to benefit further research on the
migratory game birds that weren’t waterfowl. Over the years the great bulk of the
Services attention, money and resources has always gone into waterfowl which
is proper I think but on the other hand, other res, other species such as the
mourning dove, woodcock snipe, fan tailed pigeon and so forth were being
overlooked. The Service doing virtually little about these so, a group of
concerned people including citizens and sportsman got together and prevailed
upon Congress to make a special appropriation of I believe it was one point eight
million dollars to further research on the non-waterfowl migratory game birds.
We always have problems describing this group of birds, some people call them
migratory upun and mig, upun and shore birds and different handles but we don’t
have a good designation for them so I’ll just call them non-waterfowl although it is
47
a negative connotation so, so here the Service is, it’s confronted with this brand
new appropriate of one point eight million dollars and part of it was ear marked
for research studies to be undertaken by the states and part of it to be done by
the Fish and Wildlife Service and how, how do you distribute this, this pot of
money in a useful and meaningful way so that was the job I got into upon getting
back to Patuxent. My title was really Chief of Migratory shore up and game bird
studies. But this is a big part of the job that first year and so, it meant a lot of
meetings with people state and state people and Federal people and the various
associations of state fish and game commissioners and the international
association of so four from, so we laid out criteria as to the types of research that
were needed and how interested states could apply for grants under the program
and what the reporting requirements were and things of that sort and so that was
quite interesting , it involved a lot of travel around the country and so we got the
program off and running and it is still in existence but I don’t believe it’s funded
very well or certainly not satisfactory at this point. So, after a while there working
with, with Al, with Al Guise’s and Walt Crissy’s director for the migratory birds
population station we were in Snowden Hall, this is where we are located and
Snowden hall is, have you been to Patuxent? Alright, Snowden Hall is the old,
the old plantation building. It’s a single floor building, old brick colonial type
building and do you know the story of Snowden? Snowden is now a two story
building but if you look at the, look at the bricks on the outside of Snowden Hall
you can see that the original building was one story and in other words, a second
floor has been put on top of Snowden Hall and the story tell back there is that
48
when Mrs. Snowden moved out there to occupy the, this plantation she was very
put out that the, well people of our standing don’t live in single floor dwellings,
you know you have to have a second floor if you’re going to be anybody very
important and so there upon a second floor was added to Snowden and if you
visit Patuxent you can see where that change in roof line has been made.
Anyway, we were extremely cramped because more and more people were
being brought on board. Walt Crissy was devising all sorts of new programs, a
parts collection survey for example, where hunters would send in duck wings or
goose tails and techniques have been found by Sa, Sam Carnie and others
working with him as to how to identify not only the species of bird of course from
a wing, we’re talking about ducks now but, but also the sex of it and in many
cases also the age of it. So we’re beginning to understand the population
dynamics, have a little more background on this and let me say that I’ve never
met anyone I don’t think with the insight that Crissy had into what really makes
the north American waterfowl duck resource click. He had amazing perspectives
and he’s innovative in how to, how to address those issues. He perfected the,
the breeding ground surveys that the flyway biologists participate in now and the
winter surveys and, and these new parts collects surveys. Also, a hunter harvest
survey that was based upon a sampling of persons who buy duck stamps, so
called duck stamps so that there is a nationwide randomized semi-randomized
matter of gathering basic data on duck populations well, simply stated production
of a resource has to equal that resources mortality, that is the bottom line of any
wildlife population but involved in it of course or well how does mortality takes its
49
shape, what causes it? Is it controllable? Is there anything you can do about the
thing and this responsibility is particularly important I think when we’re talking
about a, a mortality that is permitted by the Federal government namely hunting.
So, we had a high obligation in that respect and Crissy had a wonderful insight
into how these various pieces would fit together. In fact, I don’t it’s generally
known but after Walt Crissy analyzed the population of fall flight and the
regulations have been set every year he put together his estimate as to what the
breeding population survey the following year would show and this was put into a
sealed envelope and a copy was given to the director and I do not know of any
accounting you know, the following year after the surveys have been taken as
exactly how Crissy’s estimates compared with, with what the survey data
reflected. I’ve heard Walt talk about it on occasion that we missed it by two
million Mallards or something in the breeding survey but there’s always an
explanation. There was always an explanation as to why it didn’t come out you
know, pretty much in line with his, his estimates but from what I know I think he, I
think he must have been fairly close a lot of times in those estimates. I don’t
think that story’s ever been told. And I’ve never seen, I’ve never seen his
estimates and I don’t know much more about it then what I’ve related.
Q It’s a little more formal now, I mean we actually make projections now that
are more public.
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That’s right you know, we never projected that the fall flight was going to be one
hundred and ten million birds for example and people always ask that question
and that was the most disturbing question to answer because well, we didn’t
have the mechanism for doing that but, but we have a much better insight into
things nowadays I think. Well, anyway one of the exciting things at Patuxent was
the advent of the computer and the computer arrived just, I think it was a matter
of weeks if not months, I don’t think it was months ago and it was an IBM 360
Model 20, it’s a great thing, it’s a great new machine we have over here. A fellow
by the name of Manny Vearo was in charge of the, what we called the ADP
section and the, the name was eventually changed to EDP, electronic data
processing and some people would call it the eventual data processing section
but before that everything was done, all the data were on punch cards, tons and
tons and thousands of punch cards, tons of punch cards, drawers, boxes
everywhere, punch cards everywhere you look were punch cards and so they
were fed through the counter and then you’d have to resort them to find
something else ungodly, ungodly mess you know to really try to process any
amount of data, so the advent of the computer was really something special and
there’s another great thing that happened and we got these huge machines, they
looked like suitcases and these were electronic calculators, they weighed about
70 or 80 pounds. The, I know, I know the gals in the office that often did the
tabulation, they were too heavy for them to lift so whenever they wanted them
moved, when they moved they’d always have to find a mail around somewhere
to help them and these were great machines, these were Cathogreytubes and
51
you looked at this wonderful display of the figures up here and you could punch
it, punch things into the keyboard and they’d change up here on the screen and it
was just absolutely magnificent. Well, the problem was they did four things, they
added, the subtracted, they divided and they multiplied. They did no other
function. They did no more then today’s hand held calc, not that much, not
nearly that much, hand held calculator and back in those days a real problem,
always a problem, was just the simple arathmatic error by, by doing all these
calculations manually you always had to double check it and you have someone
else double check. You know, does this string of numbers add up and
everything? I mean that was an enormous, enormous handicap and the frightful
thing is how many errors slipped by and lead to some consequential decision you
know that really was wrong. I don't know of any first hand cases off hand but I'm
sure there must have been some around. So, just going from mechanized
calculations to, to the computer was something enormous not that computers
don't make mistakes but the computer mistakes are mistakes made by humans
working with the computer. It's nice to blame the computer but you dig a little
deeper you're going to find a human hand behind it somewhere. Well, of course
we found out shortly that the model 20 was not capable of handling the data we
had it far exceeded that and we called in an IBM under contract and asked us to
look at, to look at the system there at Patuxent and make recommendations and
so IBM sent in a crew and they, they met with all the folks there, people in the
banding office and people involved in the surveys and all the rest of it and they
said you know, you people have one of the most complicated data systems we've
52
ever seen, said we just can't, we can just hardly comprehend the complexities of
the, of the statistical problems that you're confronted with and, and trying to
develop regulations for hunting waterfowl and other game birds, they were just
absolutely astounded with the complexity of the program and everything. Well,
fortunately the Fish and Wildlife Service and out group out there at Patuxent
wasn’t the only one that had problems with the computer and so this ended up
with the Department of Interior setting up a computer system and they ended up
with this huge, huge machine, it was an IBM 360 model 65 what ever that was,
but it could do a great deal more then we could but, so we would send down jobs
and they were on computer tapes, down to Interior, we had a courier, that was
his main business would take these tapes down to Washington, DC and wait
around while they process the jobs and everything and bring them back and of
course when you are working in a big agency like that different agent, different
parts of the agency have competing interests and needs. So, we're talking about
priorities now and you're talking about expensive, high costs and so we'd usually
run our jobs, the big jobs at night, it was a differential charge, you where they had
to have it back the same day or whatever and so we'd try to economize by, by
running our stuff in the evening, send it down in the afternoon by courier and pick
it up the next morning and that was the way it was working when I left there and
since then I don't know how many generations of computers the both the
Patuxent and the Department of Interior have gone through but I'm sure it's very,
very many but anyway it's fascinating in those days working with that sort of stuff.
53
I'd like to say a little bit about the division of management enforcement but it too
evolved over the years, particularly that the emphasis became more towards law
enforcement and less towards the management activities that their people would
participate in the past. This has both it's good and bad aspects of course, you
know, it probably made for a more sophisticated law enforcement, a concern was
coming up about the endangered, endangered species and, and unlawful
international trade and so there was a real need for a division of management
enforcement or branch of management enforcement to change and so it
eventually became the division of, of law enforcement and probably Clark Bavin
the Chief was instrumental in that but the, but the professionalism of, of service
enforcement officers became higher I think they were able to spend a much
higher part of their time in true enforcement activities, these have been
complicated by a number of things like I mentioned endangered species act and
sitees and some of the other regulations that gave the Federal government more
authority in terms of wildlife importation and preservation. Likewise, things
changed from the management standpoint. Walt Crissy's migratory bird
population station which I went to work under existed there at Patuxent for I'm
guessing maybe 10 or 12 years and but we knew we saw changes there also
and so eventually the name migratory bird population station was changed to the
office of migratory bird management, it's located in Washington. Although Crissy
was located at Patuxent he spent a great deal of time in Washington in meetings
and things was quite unhandy at least in terms of the Washington people to have
the migratory bird population people out there in the countryside, they wanted
54
them in closer. Also some of the legislation had changes, in the of setting
regulations for example. We had to react to, to the impacts of the endangered
species program. There became what is called section seven consultation, that
before we can set up, establish the waterfowl regulations each year. We have to
go into a consultation with their office of endangered species to determine that
none of the actions that we are prosing to do in terms of hunting migratory game
birds had any impact on any species that have been designated as threatened or
endangered. Another change was NEPA, National Environmental Procedures
Act. This set out the means by which the Federal government establishes
regulations. It declares that the meetings will be open to the public, it will be
advertised so that the public can attend. There’s certain steps that require even
after the regulations are proposed for people to, to respond and to evaluate them
before the final regulations are promulgated. The whole series of things like this
that, that came into being that greatly complicated the, the job of managing North
American waterfowl and setting regulations and a lot of these had legal
consequences so there’s a, there’s a justification for, for having sourcers at hand
to review the various required documents, things of that sort. So, after Walt
Crissy retired the office of migratory, migratory management, bird management
under Dr. John Rogers was, was established and so John’s office was moved
down to the interior building and I stayed at Patuxent as, as his assistant for two
or three years as I recall and eventually moved down to Washington myself and
my job then was Chief of the branch of operations in the office of migratory bird
management and in that job I had I suppose probably two primary
55
responsibilities, one was as a supervisor to the flyway representatives, I should
say something about them but these are key people. One assigned to each of
the four flyways, the Atlantic, Mississippi, central and pacific. These are the key
people that represent the Fish and Wildlife Service in migratory bird matters and
including the regulatory matters and that was a, an extremely simple job from my
aspect because we had such competent people in those jobs, we had Ed Addy
and, and Warren Byrondon and Jerry Saree in now in the Atlantic flyway position
and we had, we had Art Hawkins and then Ken Gamble came along as the
representative for the Mississippi flyway and then we had, in the central flyway
we had Ray Bower and later Harvey Miller and in the Pacific flyway John Shatten
who was followed by, by Jim Bartnick. These are all solid, competent people and
the amount of supervision and problems that that part of the job entailed was
pretty minimal. It was, we had a wonderful working relationship there I guess.
And the second part of the job as chief officer of the branch of operations was the
regulatory procedure and as enjoyable as the other part of the job was, this is
just as much the opposite. A series of regulations and meetings and procedures
and everything on a very, very tight budget, everything under stress. Once the
biological data had been assembled and evaluated and made available to
everyone then, then we had to begin a series of meetings in house and also
meetings with the various flyway technical committees and flyway councils and
public meetings require under NEPA and doing all the consultations under the
endangered species act and it just, and meetings with the office of migra, of
management and budget for example. I remember one year when a President
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came in and his message was, we’re going to abolish as many Federal
regulations as we can. Let’s get rid of them. So, in due time we got a message
that we were due for a meeting with the office of management and budget
because office of management and budget was proposing to eliminate the
regulatory procedures and process for setting regulations. Little did they
recognize that under the treaties that we had with Canada and Mexico and so
forth, migratory birds, the designated migratory birds are totally protected.
There’s no taking of them. There are no seasons on them. There’s no hunting
permitted on them unless the Secretary of the Interior specifically provides for
such taking. So, if the regulations were prohibited, withdrawn, no longer used
anymore, this meant that that was the end of all migratory bird hunting in the
United States as well as other permitted uses of the resource. So, we met over
there with management, people in the office of management and budget and
they started out real gung ho, yep we want to get rid of your regulations and so
forth and it took a long, long time to explain to them that in truthfulness the
migratory bird hunting regulations are permissive, they permit, permit the uses of
these, of the resource for human. Without the regulations there would be no use
of migratory birds. It was totally, they had a totally, they held the usual, they held
the usual position with regard to most regulations which was right but ours was
just the opposite and it took a long, long time to bring them around to the point to
understand that and I, in fact, I remember one time some individual and I’m not
going to name him or myself, said if you want to see pure hell, if you want to see
pure hell, you shut the hunting seasons on migratory game birds. You may have
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thought I said that but I, I’m not going to admit that. So, that was a very stressful
job in setting the annual, helping set the annual hunting regulations understand I
had no part in what most of the decisions were, those decisions were made
elsewhere but I did handle the, pulling together the information for the Federal
registry which is the Federal government official means of advising the public
what it intends to do or is doing.
Q You wanted to talk about
Well, yeah I’d like to say, just some comments generally about the Directors,
wonderful Directors we had back when I was working not to, not to negate the
present ones because I don’t know anything about them but we had some really
dedicated professional people and there was Len Greenwalt and Dan Jansen
and John Gachuck and I have got a real warm heart in, place in my heart for
John Gachuck and I think a lot of Fish and Wildlife Service people do but was a
true professional and he is, he accomplished so much, so much during the days
that he was regional, regional director first in Boston and then director of the Fish
and Wildlife service in Washington. I, he was a gentleman of the highest order
and I don’t think there are many employees that worked during his days that just
wouldn’t give their utmost to help John in any way possible but I think one of the
things I remember about him most was when I was still under Minneapolis
regional office and Dan Jansen had stepped down as regional director and we
understood a new gentlemen by the name of John Gachuck at least he’s new to
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me but not to a lot of other people had been appointed director of the, of the Fish
and Wildlife Service and we had noticed that he was going to be in the
Minneapolis regional office next week, their regional director was Bob Burwell
and Bob sent out a notice that he expected all employees that could possibly
leave their job to spend part of the afternoon with John Gachuck during his visit
and so we of course are anxious to meet the new director and so the meeting
came off and John got up there and he says, folks he says, I know a lot of you
and a lot of you I don’t know but he said I’m John Gachuck and for better or
worse he says, I’m, I’m your knew director but he said, you know you’re not going
to hear much from me about what I think our mission ought to be. He said I’ll
give a few words, some ideas and so forth but he said, I’m here chiefly to listen to
you and so John spoke for 15 or 20 minutes and he stopped and he says now,
he says I’m, I’m the listener, the floor is yours, and he said you can ask any
question you want and I’ll do my best to, to answer it and of course, he says, you
know I can’t, I won’t be able to answer some of them because I don’t know the
answers to them yet but he said I want you to, I want to hear from you as to what
you think our Fish and Wildlife should do. What are we doing good? Where can
we make improvements? He said, he spoke a great deal about the
responsibility, the great responsibility he felt as being director and the obligations
that the Fish and Wildlife Service had and it was one if the most memorable
occasions during the years I’m familiar with, with the Service was to have John
out there that day. And John visited every regional office that week. He went
from one to the other and he had exactly the same sort of meeting and I can tell
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you that at the end of that week he had, he had the troops one thousand percent
behind him. And John had a remarkable memory of facts and people and places
and at that meeting I, I had the occasion to, after his meeting in Minneapolis I
had the occasion to go up and visit briefly with him, with everyone else in the
regional office and so a few months after that I transferred to Patuxent and
Marilyn and I were unfamiliar with the DC area and everything but there was a
big controversy going on about the location of, is was a super highway or
interstate or something in Virginia and there was a lot of concern about it
because this is going to go through not only an area of very expensive
residences but their civil war trenches along the same site and one person in
particular had a renowned azalea garden and the highway is to go right through,
right through this particular property and so we read that, that anybody that
wanted to could come out, come out and view this site where the highway was
going to go and Marilyn and I thought well, let’s run down there and look at this
and look at the civil war trenches and everything and we pulled up there and
looked around and walked back to get in our car and a car drove up, it was John
Gachuck and his wife, Edith and John got out of the car walked over called me
immediately, immediately by name and said I’d like you to meet my wife here and
I’ve meet your wife and we exchanged greetings and everything but how possibly
he could remember a name just coming out a group of hundreds of people and I
was in the wrong place, why should I be there? Why should he be there? The
circumstances just crazy but he had that wonderful, wonderful knack of
connecting with people and he, and he had a wonderful sense of judgment and
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making, making decisions of the most difficult kind that were probably the best
that could be made under the circumstances.
Q John had a very competent staff I think.
That right he had total confidence in his people. You know, he’d recognize them
as professionals and they gave him the very best professional guidance that they
possibly could and being director is an extremely difficult job with political
pressures from the hill and the President’s office and so forth and, and John
always stuck by his guns whatever he finally concluded was the right thing to do,
that’s what John Gachuck did.
Q Okay, Milt.
Okay, you know sometimes I’m asked, I’m asked the question well, gee what
would you do different if, if you had to do it all over again and gosh, in all
truthfulness I’m speaking of Fish and Wildlife days but also the, even the days in
Idaho and everything and I, I just feel so, so privileged to have had the
opportunity and oh, in a couple, several respects of course working, working with
the resource and, and the work generally being so enjoyable and hopefully
productive, you feel like maybe you’ve, you’ve accomplished a little bit anyway.
I, at least that was the feeling back in the old days when individuals could make
individual contributions and I recognize that circumstances make that quite
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different now that you know, we’re probably more grouped and specialist
(inaudible) we tend to be more genoas we knew a lot of things about broad
things and not to much about anything in particular and I suspect that today
we’re, we’ve become more specialized, more folks out here that know a great,
great deal about little slivers of information but I, I wonder how it all fits together
and I, I think, I’m not negating that in anyway but very specialized information like
that I think has to be brought together, assimilated in and lead to some
comprehensive overall objective or solution to problems and but personally
working for the Fish and Wildlife Service has been so rewarding, it’s given me the
opportunity to meet so many fine people and friendships that have endured over
the years and to visit many, many places I’d never gone to before and including
foreign counties and foreign assignments and I, there’s some things I guess, you
know, I probably would have done a little bit different but by in large it’s been an
enormously satisfying career.
Q What are you proudest about? What’s your legacy?
Professionally or what?
Q Professionally.
Well, there have been several things. I don’t know which one would be, I’d single
out maybe but I, I enjoyed the wetlands program a great deal because hopefully
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the areas that were set aside, purchased will be something that will be held in
perpetuity for, for the betterment for north American waterfowl. I, many, many of
the research accomplishments folks, I’m not degrading what the
accomplishments are but sometimes they don’t seem to have enduring benefits
maybe like something physical like a wetland out there. I enjoyed working with
Graham Cooch of the Canadian Wildlife Service in apply satellite imagery for
monitoring snow conditions on the breeding grounds of the arctic nesting and sub
arctic nesting geese and Bob Monroe from the Wildlife group out of Patuxent was
involved in that. He’d been doing some other use of satellite imagery for, for his
studies and we got thinking about it that, what would these imageries, images
show in terms of snow condition in the arctic we knew from experience that arctic
nesting geese tend to go though years of boom and bust, they have great
production years and they have poor production years or virtually no production
years and a lot of that seemed to be, we thought oriented to, to the advent
disappearance of snow at a, at a critical time in the biological aspect goose
production. Were the breeding grounds clear of snow and ice at the time when
the geese had to begin nesting because of the shortness of the season up there.
There’s a given time when they must begin if they’re going to produce, incubate
the eggs produce the eggs and rear them to flight stage. They themselves go
through molt and be able to depart before another winter sets in on the arctic.
Well, we knew quite a bit about, the Canadians in particular knew quite a bit
about dates of when nesting should start in different areas and so we used some
of those dates which generally arranged around June the 15th and so we ordered
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satellite imagery through NASA and began to systematically look at some of the
breeding, major breeding grounds on Hudson Bay and Banks Island and, and the
Alaska coast and other places and of course we don’t see geese on satellite
pictures but we can tell whether the breeding grounds have got snow cover or
not and so I think to some extent we were able to understand the years and
predict the years when goose production was likely to be bad. We could never
do the other aspect of it, how good would success be. We could never get to
that point, you need ground truthing in order to make that sort of an adjustment
but, but I think at that time it was sort of an exciting project to work on to be able
to use satellite imagery for a very practical part of the north American goose
management.